Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 unveiled

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 19 May 2008 at 08:45

Mozilla has unveiled Release Candidate 1 for Firefox 3, as the June release of the popular open-source browser creeps closer.

Mozilla claims the latest itineration contains around 14,000 updates, though the one most people are liable to notice is the page rendering, now handled by the Gecko 1.9 Engine which puts a significant spring in Firefox's step when loading web pages.

Other notable features include improved JavaScript rendering, which Mozilla claims will double the speed of script-heavy pages such as Gmail. The company is also touting its new slimline memory usage model, no doubt with one eye on Firefox's reputation for needing a lot of memory.

The team has also tinkered with behaviours in the location bar, which now displays two lines of information including the web address, page title and highlighted search terms. It also searches bookmarks as well as browsing history, and while it has the potential to be extremely useful, many commentators have complained it's over-cluttered.

Mozilla is also boasting of greater malware protection, resumable downloading and greater integration across all operating systems.

You can get hold of the Release Candidate here.