Mozilla has issued the first official release candidate of Firefox 3, the next major version of the popular open source web browser. Firefox 3 includes a visual refresh as well as a multitude of exciting new features and significant improvements. Our testing indicates that this release candidate is fairly robust and ready for extensive testing.

One of the most impressive features in Firefox 3 is the new Places system, a massive overhaul of the browser's bookmark and history functionality that is built on SQLite and provides noticeable improvements to performance and data integrity. The Places system has facilitated a number of very compelling user interface enhancements, like the new combined history and bookmarks organizer and an impressively intelligent new autocompletion implementation for the browser address bar.

Firefox 3 is built on top of Gecko 1.9, a new version of Mozilla's powerful rendering engine, which now uses the cross-platform Cairo rendering framework. Gecko 1.9 brings Firefox into the age of Acid2 compliance and also greatly improves SVG handling and reflow. It also made possible a handful of other long-awaited feature like full-page zooming.

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