Mozilla releases second Firefox 3 release candidate

Mozilla has released the second release candidate for its upcoming Firefox 3 web browser, ahead of the full release in mid-June.

Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2 (RC2), a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback, was released on Wednesday.

"The second Firefox 3 release candidate is now available for download," wrote Mozilla's vice president of engineering, Mike Beltzner, in a blog post. "It includes new features, as well as dramatic improvements to performance, memory usage and speed."

Memory-usage improvement has been a consistent theme during Firefox 3's development. The Firefox 3 betas and Firefox 3 RC1 promised improved memory usage. In RC2, memory cycles are now broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed and caching strategies have been tuned. In the Firefox 3 RC2 release notes, Mozilla claimed tweaks to the browser's JavaScript engine have also improved performance.

Security has also been enhanced in Firefox 3 RC2, with the inclusion of a web-forgery protection page, as well as a site information drop-down bar to see who owns the site and check whether the connection is being eavesdropped on. A user's bookmarks, history, cookies and preferences are stored in a secure database format which will help prevent data loss if a system crashes, said Mozilla.

Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 web-rendering platform, which has been under development for 34 months. According to the Firefox 3 RC2 release notes, RC2 also promises changes to stability and rendering correctness.