Firefox 3 creeps closer to official launch, as Release Candidate 2 arrives
Firefox pushes on towards an official launch with yesterday’s launch of the Release Candidate 2 version. Mozilla’s eagerly awaited third version came out of beta last month, and now web developers and other interested parties are crawling all over a version which should be fairly close to the final version.
There’s a mountain of improvements in Firefox 3 compared to Firefox 2, many relating to the important issues of security, reliability, and performance.
On the security side, there’s malware protection, a web forgery protection page, checks for add-ons and plugins, protection against cross-site attacks, and the ability to see information about a particular web site simply by clicking on its icon in the location bar.
Firefox’s JavaScript engine has been speeded up, and memory leaks (the curse of many a Firefox user) are supposed to be tightened up. Additionally, user data (such as bookmarks, cookies, and preferences) are stored in a more secure database format so that, even if the browser crashes (ha ha) they’ll be protected.
Added to these, a whole host of features have been added which are supposed to make FF3 easier to use, including better password management, simplified add-on installation, full page zooming, tab scrolling, and better integration with Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.
For a complete list of improvements you can expect to see if Firefox 3, visit the Firefox 3 (Release Candidate 2) Release Notes page.
Firefox isn’t quite ready for your gran to download, but if you like tinkering about with cutting edge software and are happy to take the risk of it crashing from time to time, you can download FF3 RC2 now.
Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2 download page
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