Firefox 3 RC1 put out for fiddling with

Break it if you can

Firefox 3 release candidate 1 has been released in to the wild. Mozzerella reckons it's seen some 14,000 updates including some major reworking on improving performance, stability and code simplification.

The preview release is really just really published to collect feedback from developers and the testing community, before advancing on to the next stage of the whole development process.

Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has undergone some serious development over the past 33 months.

Some of the key features spoken about in this iteration of the browser are: malware protection, new web forgery protection, new SSL error pages, add-ons and plugin version checker, greater anti-virus integration and Vista parental control accessibility.

Items that fall under the more “Easier to Use” category boast: easier password management, a new download manager, resumable downloading, full page zoom, tab scrolling and quickmenus, also better integration with Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.

Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office can now run twice as fast in Firefox 3, or so they’ve stated. Several new technologies working together for better memory usage by the application reduce the amount of resources needed by Firefox 3 in a single browsing session, apparently.

Mozilla offers Firefox 3 for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X in a variety of languages all ready for you to try out right now.