As we noted earlier today, after five beta versions have gone through testing, Mozilla has delivered Release Candidate 1 (RC1) of version 3 of the Firefox browser, for Windows, the Mac and Linux. I've been using all the previous beta versions, and while I'm still frustrated that I can't use my extensions with RC1, the rendering speed is so much faster than previous versions that I'm ready to use it as my main browser most of the time. It is still pre-release software, but the speed and several of the new features are truly welcome additions to almost everybody's favorite open source browser. Here's a tour of what's under the hood.

While improving rendering speed and reducing rendering glitches have been among Mozilla's top goals with version 3 of Firefox, there are actually quite a lot of welcome new features in the new version. There are security enhancements, improvements to the interface of the browser, improvements in Firefox's long-standing problems with how it handles memory, and more.

Among the interface improvements in RC1, I like the way my browsing history is handled now, as seen below. In the history pull-down list, I can peruse icons representing the sites I've visited, I can see the URLs for the places I've been, and I get short descriptions of what the sites I've visited are all about.

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