Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1: Mouse On

Mozilla fans will be happy to hear that Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download (via digg). Release notes —with quite a long list of improvements— are available here and you can download the browser here.

First impressions, after 15 minutes of surfing with it (on MacOS X Leopard):

Faster than previous beta when loading up. As for browsing, Firefox completes SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in 3363.4 ms, comparing to Safari 3.1.1. 3614.6 ms. BUT I really haven’t noticed any big browsing speed improvement over previous beta.
MacOS X background / foreground windows color scheme — RC 1 now follows it; when it’s in foreground it’s gray and when it’s in background it’s lighter.
Text editing key bindings — Looks like they fixed them (or at least some of them). John Gruber complained about this; I’ve tested the up and down arrow function and it moves the insertion point now properly.
MacOS X system dictionary still not supported.
Tab quickmenu — On the right side of the tab-bar, there is now a button which lists all open tabs in an drop-down menu and takes you to the selected tab when clicked. It lists only tabs in current windows. To bad it doesn’t work cross-window — it would be a nice shortcut function for switching windows and tabs with one click.
Acid 3 reports 70/100. Still long way to go.
Search field — Now also in Downloads window. It’s not a function that I would use constantly, but sometimes it’s handy.