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En route to an official launch next month, Mozilla put up for download its Firefox 3 Release Candidate yesterday evening. Mozilla is describing Firefox 3 RC1 as yet another milestone “focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform.” According to notes associated with Firefox 3 RC1, the browser, based on Gecko 1.9, has been under development for the sum of 33 months.
Scheduled for a full public debut in just a few weeks, Firefox 3 has been widely reviewed as a significantly faster and less taxing (systemically) iteration of Mozilla’s open source browser platform. Over the course of its beta development, the browser has been issued in five major progression stages. Firefox 3 Release Candidate, now available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and with support for 45 languages, is said to include several amendments and enhancements, which Mozilla’s in-house developers explain as:
- Improvements to the user interface based on user feedback, including changes to the look and feel on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
- Changes and fixes for new features such as the location bar autocomplete, bookmark backup and restore, full page zoom, and others, based on feedback from our community.
- Fixes and improvements to platform features to improve security, web compatibility and stability.
- Continued performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization continues to improve performance over previous releases as measured by the popular SunSpider test from Apple, and in the speed of web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office.
In all, Firefox 3 purportedly will sport many advances over the previous major browser revision, Firefox 2. Among them will be easier password management, a simplified add-on installation process, as well as more robust and streamlined download manager, easier bookmarking for users accustomed to operating most all browser features with their cursors. and many other components. As for improvements to performance besides an altered JavaScript engine, Mozilla claims that changes to the browser’s memory management system and a refurbished data management (in case of interruptions or crashes), all work to better the user’s experience.
Naturally, when Firefox 3 has its official debut in June, users can expect to discover numerous bugs and oddities that have not been fixed. If the experiences of our own Stan Schroeder with respect to the beta releases of Firefox 3 are any indication (at least as far as add-ons are concerned), it will be several months minimum that Mozilla fans will spend adjusting themselves fully to the new platform. But if the mostly commendable critiques among beta testers from around the blogosphere are taken as a preliminary guide of what’s to come, suffice to say that the transition to Firefox 3 will likely prove less of a problem than was the debut of version 2.0.
Source: mashable.com
Posted By: IndoSourceCode
