Mozilla Firefox 3 Release Date Confirmed

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Following a development period of some three years, Mozilla have today announced that their new FireFox 3 browser (release candidate) will become available for download on June 17 and, having tried the beta, we can confirm that FF3 is not only a great deal faster but its also, thankfully, far less resource hungry than its pervious iterations – though, at the time of writing, the majority of our favourite plug-ins are wholly incompatible with this new version.

Announced by Mike Beltzner on Mozilla’s development blog, whilst the release of FireFox 3 will doubtless be widely welcomed there was, up until the last minute, one fly in the ointment, so to speak, in the form of a bug that specifically affects users running MacOS (namely Bug 436275) which caused Mac systems to crash, requiring a restart (so it was hardly in the league of being merely a ‘minor annoyance’). Thankfully, however, this appears to have been resolved.

Initially, of course, you’ll have to allow for numerous plug-in developers to update their scripts (we found that most of the plug-ins we rely on simply would not play ball with FF3) so, if you’re thinking of upgrading FireFox as soon as possible and you happen to have a series of plug-ins that you deem as being indispensable we would strongly advise that you check for compatibility issues prior to making the jump.