There's now a Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 3

Early Betanews tests indicate some noticeable changes in the performance profile of a Release Candidate for Mozilla Firefox 3.5 that was posted to the organization's servers this morning. Overall, performance has improved by 1.7% in RC3 over RC2, released Monday, although underneath the surface, there appear to be some big gains and some setbacks.

Regular string expression (RegEx) handling appears to have suffered in the latest release, with SunSpider performance benchmarks indicating RC3 required 100.4 ms to complete that heat, versus 85 ms for RC2. Other SunSpider scores were marginally slower, though RC3's scores in rendering and the Celtic Kane battery helped RC3 to more than compensate. Array object handling, for instance, improved by an astonishing 40% in RC3.

We also noticed what appeared to be a JavaScript event processing error in RC3 in Win7, in Betanews tests this afternoon, although we have not yet confirmed whether the browser itself is to blame or whether the event is a fluke.

In all, Firefox 3.5 RC3 in Windows 7 posted a Betanews index score of 9.0 versus 8.85 for RC2. In other words, RC3 is now performing at nine times the level of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista SP2.
The latest beta channel release of Google Chrome 3 also made its way to Fileforum today, following up on the latest Opera 10 Beta release a few days ago. So soon we'll reset the field for you, and give you another full-field rundown.