The latest (and final) testing version of Firefox 3 has been unleashed upon the masses. Mozilla tempted the early adopters by announcing the availability of Firefox Release Candidate 2 before the software was available on its download page. As soon as that news hit the wires, we started reloading the page like mad in a geeky race to grab it first.
Testers are now encouraged to try out the last release candidate before Firefox 3 is officially unveiled to the world on "Firefox Download Day," the fake holiday invented by Mozilla to promote zero-day adoption of the next-generation web browser. For the record, Firefox download day is whenever testing is done -- unannounced for now, but most likely sometime in June.
There are no visible changes or new features since the last release candidate. The latest update includes some last-minute bug fixes but largely mirrors what we saw in RC1 and what we will see in the final release. If all goes well, with this final round of testing, there won't be much more development before June is through.
Firefox 3 is slick and fast. It carries some welcome new features like security enhancements, improved memory and resource usage, better page rendering performance and a redesigned user interface. There's also a new history and discovery tool dubbed the "Awesome bar," (what was formerly known as the address field) which guesses your desired destination while you type. The final testing version is available for download on Mozilla.com in packages for Linux, Mac and Windows. There are 45 language-specific builds available.
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