With the release of Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1, we’re now one step closer to the final release of Firefox 3.
According to the official announcement, Firefox 3 RC 1 introduce several imrpovements including:
1. Easier password management: an information bar replaces the old password dialog so you can now save passwords after a successful login.
2. Simplified add-on installation: the add-ons whitelist has been removed making it possible to install extensions from third-party sites in fewer clicks.
3. New Download Manager: the revised download manager makes it much easier to locate downloaded files, and you can see and search on the name of the website where a file came from. Your active downloads and time remaining are always shown in the status bar as your files download.
4. New graphics and font handling: new graphics and text rendering architectures in Gecko 1.9 provides rendering improvements in CSS, SVG as well as improved display of fonts with ligatures and complex scripts.
5. Speed: improvements to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimizations have resulted in continued improvements in performance. Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3, and the popular SunSpider test from Apple shows improvements over previous releases.
6. Memory usage: Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox 3 over a web browsing session. Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned.
More new features here
I was in fact tempted to upgrade due to 5 and 6 and several improvements which benefits web developers.
But alas, after upgrading, I found that most of the extensions and themes are now not working. This is probably a version compatibility issue, and until the extensions author fixes them (it’s in fact really easy if you know what to edit in the .xpi), don’t upgrade yet if you can’t live without your exension running in your firefox.
Update: Here’s a how to make older extensions work in newer firefox guide.
Leave a Reply