Firefox Release Candidate 1

Okay, it might only be a release candidate for Firefox 3 .. but it is the best browser I have used. It is lightning fast, the 'smart bar' for an address bar is absolutely phenomenal. Some of the best features of all the major browsers are incorporated into RC1, but it remains extremely fast. Let me give you a little tour:

1. The Fastest Browser so far. I'm not exaggerating at all. Lifehacker has done tests on RC1, and it has turned out to be the speediest browser:

"Mozilla VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer claims that Firefox 3 is 9.3x faster than Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and 2.7x faster than Firefox 2 in terms of JavaScript performance. In terms of Gmail message load time, he claims Firefox 3 is 6.8x faster than IE7 and 3.8x faster than Firefox 2. And he says Firefox 3 beats Apple's Safari, which is also faster than Firefox 2." - From Lifehacker

2. Sleek New Design I don't know about you, but I spend a gigantic amount of time on the internet, in my web browser. So much so that I acctually care about how the browser looks around the page it is framing. Firefox 3 RC1 really delivers with much sleeker tabs, buttons, and ever the 'Back' button has been redesigned to be larger for when you need to go back. The regular buttons are take up less room and the tabs are shorter in height, which really adds some space.

3. Smart Bar The Firefox Address bar is offically one of the coolest address bars I've seen. Like most browsers it will look through your history, and as you begin to type it will give you a list of places you've recently visited. But the cool part is the more you use it, that smarter it becomes. If you type in 'Tw' when you are going to twitter.com, and twit.tv shows up first, you simply can press the down button a few times to get to the twitter.com entry. The next time you type 'Tw' it will bring up twitter.com before twit.tv.

Firefox 3 has certainly won me over, and now I can't wait for the offical version so developers update all of their addons.