| Firefox 2.0 RC3 hits the web, full 2.0 due Oct. 24 |
Oct. 20, 2006
 [Updated Oct. 23] -- The full production release of Firefox 2.0 is set to emerge on Oct. 24, Mozilla Corp. has confirmed. This will follow a second release candidate (RC2) release on Oct. 10, and an RC3 release on on Oct. 20.
In its RC3 announcement, the Mozilla team invited "Web application developers, our testing community, and users who want to get a sneak peek at the next version of Firefox" to "download and install this release candidate." (Our resident Linux guru, columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, immediately did just that.)
The team also noted, as standard procedure, that "users should not expect all of their extensions, plugins and themes from previous versions of Firefox to work properly."
 Firefox 2.0 RC3 includes many new features, according to Mozilla, including: - Visual Refresh -- Firefox 2's theme and user interface have been updated to improve usability without altering the familiarity of the browsing experience. For instance, toolbar buttons now glow when you hover over them.
- Resuming your browsing session -- The Session Restore feature restores windows, tabs, text typed in forms, and in-progress downloads from the last user session.
- Live Titles -- When a website offers a microsummary (a regularly updated summary of the most important information on a Web page), users can create a bookmark with a "Live Title." Compact enough to fit in the space available to a bookmark label, they provide more useful information about pages than static page titles, and are regularly updated with the latest information. There are several websites that can be bookmarked with Live Titles, and even more add-ons to generate Live Titles for other popular websites.
- Client-side session and persistent storage -- New support for storing structured data on the client side, to enable better handling of online transactions and improved performance when dealing with large amounts of data, such as documents and mailboxes. This is based on the WHATWG specification for client-side session and persistent storage.
The release notes include a more detailed "what's new" list, which can be viewed here.
For more detail on what's in Firefox 2.0, read SJVN's mini-review of Firefox 2, release candidate 3, our Oct. 8 coverage of the release of Firefox 2, release candidate 2, and our Aug. 31 coverage of the release of Firefox version 2, beta 2. Additionally, a slide show of screenshots is available at our sister site eWEEK.com, here.
You can download Firefox 2 Release Candidate 3 here, in more than 40 languages.
In related (?) news, Microsoft officially released Internet Explorer 7 this week.
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