Mozilla has released Release Candidate 1 (RC1) of the much awaited version 3 of Firefox, a very popular web browser. The Release Candidate version serves as a public preview of the soon to be final release of Firefox 3 and also as testing release for Open Source developers. This version is also for those who are not into software development but would like to contribute to Mozilla’s open source initiative by sending in comments and suggestions. (Hey, the more heads, the merrier!)
Mozilla developers also focus on what seems to be the most important aspect of softwares - performance. RC1 has shown improved performance on speed, memory footprint and reliability. New features has also been added, thanks to the open source community for letting the Firefox developers know what users *really* need. To give you a little peek of the new features that caught my attention, here is my faves list:
- One-click site info: Click the site favicon in the location bar to see who owns the site and to check if your connection is protected from eavesdropping. Identity verification is prominently displayed and easier to understand. When a site uses Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, the site favicon button will turn green and show the name of the company you’re connected to.
- Malware Protection: malware protection warns users when they arrive at sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware. (Try it here!)
- New Web Forgery Protection page: the content of pages suspected as web forgeries is no longer shown. (Try it here!)
- Resumable downloading: users can now resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting your network connection.
- Save what you were doing: Firefox will prompt users to save tabs on exit.
If you want to try out this bleeding edge version of Firefox, you can download the installer here.
Popularity: 5% [?]
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