The Mozilla team says its latest browser is stable, and has posted Firefox 3 RC 1 on Saturday. Apart from more than 900 enhancements the team claimed were delivered in beta 4, Firefox 3 RC1 also includes the so-called AwesomeBar, a beefed-up location bar that anticipates destinations as you type based on your browsing history.
Replacing URL-only auto-completion, the forward-thinking new capability searches URLs and Web-page titles, bookmarks and tags as you type an address, and lists the most relevant in a scrolling drop-down window based on how often and recently they were visited.
As with any major change, the AwesomeBar is not without controversy. Detractors of the feature, which has been around since beta 2, mostly say that searching anything more than recent URLs is a waste of time and are angry the feature can’t be disabled. (I might have to agree on the second point). However, the overwhelming majority of opinions I’ve seen out there are in favor of AwesomeBar.
There are dozens of other new features in RC1, including better security and malware protection, version control for plug-ins and UI tweaks for Windows XP and Vista, Mac OS X and Linux versions. According to the release announcement, all the interface enhancements were based on user feedback. There also were “dramatic improvements” to performance, memory usage and speed, as well as optimizations for Google Mail and Zoho Office thanks to JavaScript engine revs.
You can download Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 now, general availability is set for June.
