Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 1 available on Mozilla servers

Moving right along according to plan, the first release candidate of Firefox 3.0 appeared this morning among Mozilla's beta and candidate downloads. BetaNews has obtained the link, and RC1 is downloadable now.

On previous occasions during this testing cycle, what appeared to be public betas of Firefox 3 showed up in just the right place on Mozilla's servers, at just the right time, but ended up being internal builds of the product. BetaNews is testing this RC1 download now, and will have more news about it later this afternoon.

UPDATE 12:43 pm ET May 16, 2008 - As best as we can tell, it's the genuine article. As expected, most of the plug-ins recently upgraded for usability with Beta 5 were inoperable in this version, though our plug-in to switch rendering engines with Internet Explorer at will, is functional. The "About" screen clearly registered the product as "Firefox 3.0" instead of "Firefox 3.0b5." And after installation, the browser attempted to load a "What's new in 3.0" page that does not yet exist.

In the early going, we notice one obvious new addition: A link marked "Most Visited" appears next to the "Smart Bookmarks" button in the Links toolbar, which itself was an addition that cropped up, we believe, in Beta 3. Clicking on this button brings up a list of URLs that appear to be the top 10 members of the current History buffer.

The default skin looks ever-so-slightly tweaked, with more space between the new "Back" and "Forward" rocker-switch-looking contraption and the "Reload current page" button. Some pixels appear to have been cropped from the Address bar to make room.