Firefox 3 RC1 now available for testing

The Mozilla development team quietly announced the release of Firefox 3 release candidate 1 over the weekend.

The announcement was posted on May 18 and indicates that RC1 is a "public preview release" intended for testing and feedback.  RC1, which was expected to be released by the end of May, is the final testing step before Firefox 3 is formally released to the public.  Mozilla said the Rc1 was code complete on May 11 but it needed cleanup before widspread testing would be possible.

Developers said RC1 offers significant performance, memory usage and speed improvements from Beta 5 and includes new features and changes including enhancements to Vista, Windows XP, Mac OSX and Linux look-and-feel. newlocation bar autocomplete, bookmark backup and restore and  full page zoom features, changes to the JavaScript engine and improved security.

The Mozilla team has not specified a final ship date for Firefox 3 but sources in the linux distribution community say they were promised final copies in June.