14 DAY TRIAL // The wait for Firefox 3.0 is coming to an end, as Mozilla is making headway with the browser's development. After going live with the candidate bits for the RC1 version of Firefox 3.0, Mozilla offered, at the end of the past week, the fully-fledged first Release Candidate for the successor of Firefox 2.0. In accordance with tester feedback, Firefox 3.0 RC1 has the chance to be the final version of the browser if it manages to hit a certain quality standard recommending it for general release. At this point in time, Firefox 3.0's development is scoped by the end of June 2008.
"The Firefox 3 Release Candidate is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes new features as well as dramatic improvements to performance, memory usage and speed. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3," reads an excerpt of Mozilla's announcement for the availability of Firefox 3.0 RC1.
There is no official timetable for the release of Firefox 3.0, with Mozilla revealing only that it is looking for quality ahead of anything else. So far, in excess of 14,000 updates have been introduced into Firefox 3.0 and the underlying Gecko 1.9 rendering platform. The next iteration of the open source browser features a variety of improvements across all areas of the product, from boosted performance to enhanced stability and rendering. One notable addition to this release of Firefox 3.0 is what Mozilla refers to as the Awesome Bar.
In fact, Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's User Experience Lead went out on a limb and predicted that the Awesome Bar would change the way users navigate the Internet just as much as tabbed browsing. Formally dubbed the Smart Location Bar, the feature allows users to search for websites they have visited from the Address Bar of the browser. Not knowing the actual URL is no longer an impediment to re-visiting a website. In this context, the Smart Location Bar makes due without the History or the Bookmark features in order to permit people to go back to a website even if all they remember is a keyword.
According to Mozilla, Firefox 3.0 RC1 comes to the table with "improvements to the user interface based on user feedback, including changes to the look and feel on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux. Changes and fixes for new features such as the location bar autocomplete, bookmark backup and restore, full page zoom, and others, based on feedback from our community. Fixes and improvements to platform features to improve security, web compatibility and stability. Continued performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization continues to improve performance over previous releases as measured by the popular SunSpider test from Apple, and in the speed of web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office."
Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) for Windows is available for download here. Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) for Linux is here. Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) for Mac is here.