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…