Mozilla took a giant step towards the full release of the new version of its open-source browser on Friday. The release of Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 means that everything is now ready for some public testing and, all being well, a full release of the new browser next month.
Firefox is claiming a total of over 14,000 improvements in the new browser, although very few of them will be obvious. The biggest one will be speed. According to Information Week, Mozilla says Firefox 3 is more than nine times faster than IE7 and almost 3 times as fast as Firefox 2 on JavaScript performance. It will also be much less of a memory hog, supposedly using 4.7 times less memory than IE7.
What promises to be one of the most useful improvements is the one-click site info. All users have to do is, Mozilla says is “click the site favicon in the location bar to see who owns the site and to check if your connection is protected from eavesdropping. Identity verification is prominently displayed and easier to understand. When a site uses Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, the site favicon button will turn green and show the name of the company you’re connected to.”
Where pages are suspected of being forgeries, content will not be displayed, and users will be warned if they land on a page known to contain malware.
