Check out AT&T's FREE camera phonesFirefox 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.
Dan Farber is editor in chief of CNET News. He has more than 25 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. E-mail Dan.
The add-on developers will support 3.0, but there is no reason for them to chase a moving target. Now that it is an RC instead of a beta, you will start seeing add-ons running on 3.0.
>>RSM
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.