Firefox 3 Release Candidate

Mozilla has released the first Firefox 3 RC. It should be all polished up and ready to go, which is the way Mozilla does it. So time to give it a go if you are so inclined. I have been using Firefox 3 since the first beta and it is abig improvement over Firefox 2. Especially with memory handling, the leaks appear to have ben banished, and the stability is good as ever. Other improvements are the PGO ( performance guided optimizations) so far only for Windows machine, and the vastly improved JAvaScript speeds.

The big story from the users perspective is the new 'Places', the integrated history and bookmarks manager interface powered by SQLite, a small open source database engine that provides much more robust querying capabilities. With Places you are able to search your history, tags and bookmarks with a fully fledged search interface. You can select where to search, what to search and then save the search as a 'Smart Bookmark' that updates as your personal web grows and changes. Places becomes a central area for bookmarks, browsing history and downloads all in one spot with thumbnails and tagging -- All designed to help you organize your little piece of the web. Places makes it easier to deal with huge numbers of bookmarks by adding one-click bookmarking, tagging, annotations, and intelligent searching through your history right in the url location bar, and it seems to work. Once you get the hang of it, very cool. But it may take some time to understand and make use of all the new goodies.

Tagging is another new big feature, tagging is tightly related with Places and some of the changes made to the location bar: click on an empty star icon in the location bar to save the current page as a bookmark. Click it again and you can specify a folder to save the bookmark to, create a new one and add tags you can later search on. The Tags are used like personalized search key words.

There are many changes to the location bar, autocomplete works on web addresses but also looks into bookmark and history page titles and tags which make it more comprehensive. The searching function features adaptive learning so as you use the feature it learns how you may be using it and what you are looking for. Personalized.

The rest is mostly new gingerbreard, themes and such, but the stability, speed and memory reduction will be noticed by anyone with an older resource limited machine. Others can load it up and use the max, but personally I find a lot of the gingerbread distracting and prefer to keep it lean and simple.

Get yours here. Note that this isn’t the final Firefox 3 and there may still be some ugly hidden bugs that could mess with your data. Unlikely, but that’s why it is called a release candidate.

A plug for scrapbook extension -- If you do research on the web, one of the most annoying things is the content you use may disappear from the web, leaving you with a blank stare. One way to avoid this is to use a Firefox extension called 'scrapbook'. It is invaluable, because scrapbook stores the target page locally on your computer, so if the content disappears, at least you have a local archived copy. Get it here at the author's site, or from the Firefox extensions section of Mozilla's website..