Mozilla has rolled out Firefox 3 release candidate 1 to testers in advance of a full release in the weeks ahead. According to the program's developers, RC1 features more than 14,000 updates, “including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability.”

Though the latest Firefox release has been dubbed a “public preview,” it is primarily aimed at the developer community. So anyone who downloads RC1 should expect a few glitches.

For example, some Firefox 2 plug-ins are not compatible with RC1. Moreover, when Yahoo pages are loaded, images and other page elements are replaced by generic icons. On the other hand, the browser displays pristine pages from popular sites such as The New York Times portal.

User-Friendly Enhancements

Firefox 3's new auto-complete feature enables users to access a list of the matches gleaned from their recent Web-surfing history and bookmarked pages. The browser matches “what you're typing — even multiple words — against the URLs, page titles, and tags in your bookmarks and history, returning results sorted by 'frecency' — an algorithm combining frequency + recency,” noted Mozilla blogger Deb Richardson.

Firefox 3 also introduces three new bookmark features called stars, tags and smart folders. “Bookmark stars are a quick and easy way to bookmark a page with a single click,” Richardson wrote. “If you click the star again, it opens the Bookmark dialog,” giving users the ability to edit the title, add tags, file the bookmark in a folder, or delete the bookmark.

By contrast, the new tags feature enables users to add extra information to a bookmark. “Where folders let you organize bookmarks in a way, they're limited in that you can only put each bookmark in a single folder,” Richardson explained. “Not so with tags — you can add as many tags to a bookmark as you want.”

Smart folders are basically saved searches that automatically update whenever users add new items matching previous searches to their bookmarks, Richardson noted. “So if I create a 'soup recipes' smart bookmark folder, any time I add a bookmark that has 'soup' and 'recipes' in the title or tag, it will automatically be added to my 'soup recipes' folder,” she explained.

Security Boosters

Several security enhancements to Firefox 3 promise to improve the overall user experience. For example, the browser automatically warns PC users whenever they visit Web pages that are known to install viruses, spyware, Trojans or malware, and refrains from displaying the content on Web pages that are suspected to be phisher Web forgeries.

To check a Web site's authenticity, Web surfers can click on the favicon button on the location bar to find out who owns the site and check if the connection is protected from eavesdropping. Even better, the browser's favicon button turns green when pages are being accessed that use extended validation SSL certificates, which site operators can obtain only after vetting by an established certificate authority.

Mozilla developers also say improvements to the browser's JavaScript engine, together with the introduction of profile-guided optimization, speed up the browser's page-loading performance. “Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3,” they said.