Firefox 3 RC 1 now available

(Screenshot via Alex's Thoughts blog)

Mozilla released Firefox 3 release candidate 1 on May 16th. Afer 33 months of development Firefox 3 is getting much closer to being officially released!


New Features:

• Faster page loading (through faster HTML and javascript rendering)
• Less Memory usage
  "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."
• Better auto-complete in the address bar
  Now when you type part of title, a tag, or an address, Firefox will instantly pull matches from both your browsing history and bookmarks. The results are displayed in order of frequency, so your most visited pages will appear first.
• Smart Bookmarks
  These new bookmarking feature will display your recent or most visited bookmarks. The smart bookmarks folder now appear in the bookmarks toolbar and gives you quick access to all your most visited websites.
  
• Multple page zoom options
  When zooming pages you now have to option to zoom text, images, and layout, or only text
• Multiple text selections
  Now you can make multiple, non-continuous text selections in Firefox by holding down the Control/Command key to easily make multiple selections.
• Native look for Mac OS X
  Firefox now sports a brand new theme to make the toolbars, icons, and buttons visually integrated with OS X.
• Bookmark Tagging
  If you're a fan of del.icio.us or any other social bookmarking service, you'll love Firefox's bookmark tagging feature.
• Resize the location and search bar
  You can now resize the location and search bar without installing any additional extensions.
  

Compatible extensions

If you can't live without your extensions, I would first recommend checking the Firefox Add-ons page to check that your must-have extensions have been updated for compatibility with Firefox 3.

The only reason I haven't completed switched over to Firefox 3 already is because the Del.icio.us extension has not been officially released yet. Gina Trapani of Lifehacker posted Del.icio.us Extension Beta Plays Nice in Firefox 3. She links to the Del.icio.us blog post about their new beta extension.

Here's some popular extensions compatible with Firefox 3

• 1Password Extension
  
• Web Developer (Toolbar)
  
• Adblock Plus
• NoScript
  
• PDF Download
• ColorZilla
  Firefox 3.0a2

Test Drive Firefox 3 and Keep Firefox 2 Safe

If you're running a Mac and would like to try out Firefox 3 and keep Firefox 2 intact, check out Install Firefox 2 an 3 on the same computer. Since Firefox 3 shares the same profile folder as Firefox 2, they also give instructions to create a new profile and keep your original intact.


Read More:

Mozilla's Firefox 3 Release Notes

Lifehacker - Top 10 Firefox 3 Features
Lifehacker - Complete Field Guide to Testing Firefox 3