Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1
Mozilla Corporation on Friday released Firefox 3 RC1, more or less the final form of this iteration of the popular open-source Web browser.
RC stands for Release Candidate and represents a stage in which the browser’s features are complete and the code is stable enough for public testing. Barring any serious bugs, RC1 will become the official release version of Firefox 3, which is planned for June.
The release candidate stage is the stage right between beta and final release, and it’s the last chance for developers to test their code against the browser before it’s push out into the world full-force.
It’s also the stage at which add-on developers can update their browser extensions without worrying about further code changes.
The release of Firefox 3.1 will also mark the likely end of life for support of the current Firefox 2.x browsers. The plan (as it has been since the release of Firefox 1.5) is to have security/stability updates once every two months or so, until the next ‘feature’ release — which is Firefox 3.1
Firefox 3 comes with more than 15,000 improvements, according Mozilla, but you have to be counting tiny changes very carefully to get to that number. More likely, you’ll notice maybe two dozen new and improved features.
