Mozilla has announced this week that the release of Firefox 3 RC1 is out now for public testing. RC1 is a public preview release intended for testing and feedback.

Firefox official: “While Firefox 3 boasts some great new features like a smart address bar and better bookmarks manager, the best reason to upgrade will be for the performance improvements.” Firefox 3 is noticeably faster and more stable than Firefox 2 to the casual user and Mozilla engineers have numbers that show it will be the “fastest” browser on the market. A very noticeable gain can be seen in JavaScript: it is about three times faster than Firefox 2 implementation. JavaScript is twice as important for Firefox since it is not only used in a large number of web pages but it’s also what makes Firefox UI work.

Developers said RC1 includes new features and changes including enhancements to Vista, Windows XP, Mac OSX and Linux look-and-feel. They also include new location bar auto-complete, bookmark backup and restore and full page zoom features.

 The Mozilla team has not specified a final ship date for Firefox 3 but sources in the linux distribution community say they were promised final copies in June.

Source: zdnet.com