Firefox 3 release candidate goes public

The initial release candidate of Firefox 3 is ready for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

It's a public preview of the new Firefox code, available in 45 languages, aimed at developers and early adopters to test out the new features. It has an extensive list of known bugs.

Among the major improvements are changes in the look and feel on the various operating systems, major security enhancements, and increased performance and stability. It is based on the Gecko 1.9 rendering engine, which includes 14,000 updates to the code.

On the performance front, the documentation states that applications such as Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3, compared to Firefox 2, and memory usage has been improved. In addition, bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences are less susceptible to data loss.

A list of all the new features is available on the Mozilla Firefox site.

[twright3]

I updated my earlier version of 3.0 Beta and it accepted all the existing settings...no problem.

[jture]

I'll be a lot happier with it when the major extensions are updated for it (Google Toolbar is the biggie).

[vivilionheart]

The only problem so far is that almost all the old addons don't work.

[mitrich]

Well, only 6 months or so to go until it is safe to go into the water.

>>RSM

[rohankewll]

I tried to use it, but it crashes when ever I open AJAX based sites like Yahoo Mail.

[rdtmk5]

I'm using FF3 RC1 and it works perfectly with Yahoo Mail. Just wanted to let you know that it's likely not FF3 that's the problem.

[Collin1000]

I upgraded today and have had noticeable improvements, the only bug I have seen so far is a widely reported one with Facebook Chat not working, but I doubt thats an FF issue.

[raulmot]

Wow, it is really noticeably faster at rendering pages. Much, much faster.

[chris_d]

Javascript performance is incredible. It's faster than every other browser out there, even Safari. It beats firefox 2 and internet explorer by wide margins.

I threw it on a 1 Ghz P3 running Win2k and GMail is snappy. HTML rendering is also vastly improved, not just in speed, but also the memory usage is lower.

This looks like it will be a great release.

[quirK]

Have been using it since beta 3 and it has vastly improved and matured since then.