Saturday, May 17,2008 @ 4:25pm
Mozilla releases Firefox 3.0rc1 preview for testing
Mozilla has released a preview release of Firefox 3 Release Candidate, the next generation Firefox browser. Designed for "testing purposes only," the company emphasizes that preview releases are published to collect feedback from Web developers and our testing community before advancing to the next stage in the release process. Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which offers improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. Version 3 offers one-click site info, malware protection, a new Web Forgery Protection page, new SSL error pages, anti-virus integration, easier password management, simplified add-on installation, a new Download Manager, resumable downloading, and a new Firefox theme for Mac OS X along with Growl for notifications.
Version 3.0 also brings improvements to the JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimizations. The developers say that compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3, and the popular SunSpider test from Apple shows improvements over previous releases.
It also has improved memory allocation and usage and a new database that securely records user bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences to prevent data loss in cases of system crashes.