Firefox 1.0 RC1 Released
October 28th, 2004
Firefox 1.0 RC1 was released today. It is not yet on the Mozilla homepage, but you can download it from their FTP site. It includes about 250 bug fixes. Keep in mind that this is just a testing release, so if you aren’t interested in helping test and reporting bugs I suggest you hold off for a few more weeks until the product is officially released (November 9?).
Word on the street is that it starts up faster than Firefox 1.0 PR and renders pages about 2x faster. I can confirm that it does seem to start up faster, but downloading pages seems to actually be slower - pages still render fast once you’ve downloaded them though. Also, most of my plugins seem to be broken for RC1, so if you depend on having your plugins working you might want to steer clear of this release. Afterall, it is for testing before the final release.
All in all I am still very impressed with Firefox. Thanks to all of the people at Mozilla for their hard work. And it looks like their hard work is paying off - they are gaining market share.