Mozilla is Out with Release Candidate 2 of Firefox 3
by Sam Dean - Jun. 05, 2008Comments (0)- Related Blog Posts
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 Mozilla has announced that the second release candidate (RC2) of version 3 of the open source Firefox browser is available for download. We covered Release Candidate 1 previously and found it to be stable, far faster than previous versions, and better at handling memory. RC2 doesn't introduce a huge set of new features, but there are enhancements and many bug fixes.
You can find out more on the enhancements in the RC2 of version 3 of Firefox in Mozilla's Release Notes, including a list of known issues. Firefox 3 is based on an updated Gecko 1.9 rendering engine, three years in the making. The release candidates are far faster than previous versions of the browser, to the point that many users are downloading the pre-release versions now rather than waiting for the final release of Firefox 3 later this month. This latest release candidate is expected to be the final one before the official release of version 3. Mozilla has pronounced this version bug free, which is probably not completely accurate, but reflects the effort to fix bugs that has been put in.
Mozilla cites many bug fixes in RC2, as opposed to RC1, and I noticed that a problem I was experiencing when loading RC1 has gone away in RC2 (the browser was previously behaving as though it was still loaded after I shut down and attempted to reload it). There are also several new versions for various languages around the world. There aren't many interface changes in RC2, though.
None of the beta versions of Firefox, nor RC1, did a good job of handling Firefox extensions, although there have been workarounds for running some. RC2 doesn't run my extensions, and, for this reason, some users may want to wait for the official release later this month.
Mozilla has announced a download day initiative for the official release, where the goal is to earn Firefox 3 a Guinness World Record for most software downloaded in a 24-hour period. Some analysts are predicting that the official release will push Firefox past 20 percent market share in the browser space.
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