Last Friday, Mozilla released the first release candidate for the Firefox 3 browser. I have been using Firefox3 since beta 2 I think it was. Things were shaky at first, but things have been getting better, slowly but surely.

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.

Firefox 3 offers significantly improved speed and memory usage.

Mozilla VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer claims that Firefox 3 is 9.3x faster than Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and 2.7x faster than Firefox 2 in terms of JavaScript performance. In terms of Gmail message load time, he claims Firefox 3 is 6.8x faster than IE7 and 3.8x faster than Firefox 2. And he says Firefox 3 beats Apple’s Safari, which is also faster than Firefox 2.

The one “hitch” with using beta or release candidate versions is that some extensions do not yet work with the browser software. I usually fix this by modifying the extensions myself, but there are some that I don’t even want to try and mess with. Thnk goodness I am only missing two extensions. I can live with that until the extension authors release an updated version.

I can harldy wait for the full release of FF3. I am almost as excited as I was the first time I got a microfiber mop.

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