Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2 is out!
Posted by Peng on 5 June 2008
Last night Mozilla released the second release candidate for Firefox 3, and if all goes well we could see the final release as soon as the next couple of weeks.
They’ve tweaked a number of things since RC1 came out and have resolved 45 bugs, although I’m not sure if that’s just since RC1 came out. There are still some known issues, some of which will have to wait for Firefox 3.0.1 to get fixed, I’m afraid to say.
The good news is that Mozilla feels that Firefox 3 may be about ready to be released and would love it if you helped test it and make sure. Read the release notes for what’s new and more information about the release, and if you’d like to help test it visit the release announcement for a download link. (Mozilla asks that no one link directly to the download page so I’m not only not including one myself I’m also removing them from any comments posted.) You can also read our posts on Firefox 3 and the comments that people have left.
As a release candidate some of your favorite themes and addons are still not updated to work with it yet. You can check AMO for details of what versions of Firefox your favorite addons work with.
If you find an issue in the release, you can post about it in the Firefox Builds section of the MozillaZine Forums (please do a search before you start a new thread).
In other Firefox 3 news
Yesterday I posted a link to Asa Doztler’s article about some pretty impressive usage numbers for Firefox 3 already. Microsoft turned around and announced that their first beta for IE8 has already reached 2 million downloads, but as Asa wrote downloads doesn’t mean usage, which is what Firefox 3 testing versions have. He also points out that IE8b1 is “pretty unusable as a daily browser.”
The Mozilla QA community is having a Firefox 3 RC3 testday on Friday. Participating in testdays are fantastic ways to help find bugs that need to be fixed now.
As both Asa and Melissa Shapiro have written, Walt Mossbers at the Wall Street Journal has written a positive review with a video of the Firefox 3 release candidates and calls Firefox 3 “the best browser out there”, although I’m not 100% certain I’d go quite that far.
I’ve got some other things to blog, but they’ll have to wait for another post since they’re not related Firefox 3.
