Firefox 3 has reached a new milestone today with the release of Release Candidate 1. For those not into the naming conventions, alpha is best to avoid, beta is mostly stable but not done, and a release candidate is something that is completely finished but need to find any outstanding major bugs.

It is quite a nice step-up from beta 5. It is a bit speedier, and with lots of polish, as we like. I’m running the Vista build, so things may be different on other peoples machines, but they’ve added nice little Vista elements around the place. For example, the search box is italicised and grey just like the rest of the search boxes. They also appear to be using the Segoe UI font through out. Lots of blue is present. (Remember that Firefox 3 uses operating system dependent themes now, so things will look completely different on XP, Mac OS X, and Linux. The Mac OS X version looks fantastic.)

The Library, the new one-stop location for your bookmarks and history, looks a lot nicer too. Icons are present for each of the different stores (Bookmarks Toolbar, Bookmarks Menu and Unfiled Bookmarks). There are more stores for History and Tags. They have cut down on the search though, unfortunately. In the beta builds, the search operated much like the Vista search in Windows Explorer (you could add boolean searches, last access dates, etc). Now you can only restrict a search to a location and save it. Slightly disappointing, but the catch with the beta versions was that the functionality didn’t actually work perfectly, so shame they couldn’t finish it. Hopefully someone will release it as an add-on at some point in the future.

The Downloads window finally gets the Clean Up button, but they’ve named it “Clear List.” Hurrah! (Clean Up gives me the impression they’re going to wipe all my downloads).

Some extensions are having problems. Look here for information on turning off compatibility checks (but be warned and find your shortcut to Safe Mode!).

If you are using Vista, I highly recommend getting the Glasser extension. It makes the program look even more polished. Add the CSS to your userChrome.css file to make it even better.