Daily Archives: May 20, 2008

Firefox 3 RC1 Released

Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 has been released. This basically means that they’ve locked all the features and only the bug fixes are left.

For those of you who haven’t tried out any of the betas, Firefox 3 has some new features, notably the improvements to the bookmarking system and the address bar. It’s also (supposedly) a lot more stable and fast.

As far as memory consumption issues are concerned, I haven’t really noticed any improvements – it still consumes over 200 megs, which was pretty much what Fx 2 was doing with the same number of tabs (50+).

I also don’t think much of the new interface. While Fx 2 was rather plain and old-looking, at least it was neat. Fx 3’s UI seems to be a mix of new and ancient looking icons. While the new address bar has some nice features, the styling doesn’t seem to promote much usability. The download manager, incidentally, isn’t styled at all (weird).

Other issues include virtually none of my extensions working with this build. Although that isn’t unexpected (it’s not the final version, after all) I remember there weren’t so many issues when Fx 2 RC1 came out. I also have a quirky problem with bookmarking. When I bookmark all open tabs, it randomly misses out a few.

You can check out the Firefox 3 Release Candidate Release Notes here. In case you just want to try out Firefox 3 without replacing your current version, try Firefox 3 RC1 Portable.