As usual things take a while and users who download the releases directly from ftp will be the first to have the latest version up and running. Firefox 3 RC3 is available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh and all language versions. Just follow the link given above and navigate to the release that you need.

The only information available at this moment is a blog post over at Zdnet that is mentioning a bug in Firefox 3 for the Apple Macintosh that was caused by the recent update and that this release candidate is practically being created for the Mac. I’m off to install the new version and we hopefully will be able to access the release notes for Firefox 3 RC3 soon.

There have been a lot of fixes in the background and several new features and looks that are worth taking note of. Finally the new add-ons manager has been integrated which means that you can search and download new add-ons from within it. The new download manager comes to my mind as well adding more transparency to that process.

I guess I still prefer to use Download Statusbar instead if the author decides to port his add-on to Firefox 3. The speed of rendering webpages has been noticeably improved and more than 90 memory leaks have been fixed. Firefox 3 Beta 3 seems to render websites much faster than Firefox 2 does.

Two new security features have been added as well. One is a malware protection which warns the user if he visits a flagged website. The other new feature is called One-click site info which displays information like the site owner if you click on the website’s favicon.

For a list of all changes check out the release notes. Please note that this is still a beta release published for testing purposes.