Mozilla has been announcing Release Candidates for Firefox 3 consistently for the past month. In fact, Firefox 3 RC 3 was just released earlier today. One could guess that the time for an official release was right around the corner, but we wouldn’t have guessed it’d be this soon. Only hours after RC3, and after 34 months of development, the company has announced that Firefox 3 will be officially released next Tuesday, June 17th.
What To Expect
If you haven’t given any of the Firefox 3 RC’s a shot, I can personally tell you that it’s fast! Stability and performance has been consistently better than Firefox 2 with each RC. Memory usage has been down significantly over long periods of time compared to Firefox 2 where memory continued to rise with prolonged use. Features and fixes for Firefox 3 include:
- Updated address bar with integrated bookmarking functionality
- Standard themes that are consistent with the native UI of your Operating System (Windows, Mac, Linux)
- Revamped bookmark manager
- New Icons
- One-click site information
- Secure add-on updates
- Vista Parental Controls
- Revamped password management
- Full page zoom
- Scrolling Tabs
- One-click bookmarking
- Tags for bookmarks
- tons more!
Memory Usage Still a Problem
While the memory issue has improved compared to Firefox 2, browsers such as Opera and Safari are handling sites that are loaded with AJAX, videos, music, and other heavy hitters much better than Firefox 3. Josh Catone noted the following when reviewing Firefox 3 RC1:
“Unfortunately, one issue that still exists in Firefox is memory leaks. According to the release notes, developers plugged “over 300 individual memory leaks,” but still after just a few minutes of browsing with just 8 or so tabs open, Firefox was using over 150mb of RAM — and I often have 20 or 30 tabs open while writing and researching stories. Duncan Riley at TechCrunch noticed the same thing.”
…and we’re still noticing it. With that old ghost still plaguing the browser, does Firefox 3 have what it takes to set a world record in a single day?
