Firefox 3.0 Nears Release

By Greg McNevin

May 21, 2008: The full release of Firfox 3.0 is fast approaching, with Mozilla this week rolling our Release Candidate 1 (RC1) of the popular open source browser, several weeks earlier than expected.

Version 3.0 comes a full 19 months after the last big update, and will offer a range of improvements over the last, including better performance thanks to memory management improvements, more personalisation and usability options and increased security.

Security in particular is high on the agenda this time, with better malware protection, improved password management, and innovative new features such as the ability to find out who owns a website with one-click, and the ability to see if a connection is protected from prying eyes or not.

The new version will also offer many improvements for developers thanks to improvements to its Javascript engine, opening the door to big speed gains in web applications such as Zoho Office.

While release candidates are considered to be stable enough for public release, Mozilla interface designer Mike Beltzner warned that the release is primarily for testing.

“The Firefox 3 Release Candidate is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback,” said Beltzner in a post on Mozilla's developer blog.

While previous releases have undergone up to three release candidates, Firefox 3.0 is expected to have just the one, with the full release currently slated for June.

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