The first release candidate for Firefox 3 was recently revealed and I have to say I'm pretty impressed. Performance seems much snappier and it's much less of a memory hog now. What the debut of the first release candidate means is that the first non-beta release of Firefox 3 is coming soon, so if you don't want to run an app that's in beta on your machine, you don't have to wait too much longer to upgrade your browser. If you're not using Firefox at all, do it.

One of my favorite new features is the much improved image rendering. It used to be that when a large image was resized in the browser, it would look like total crap, diagonal lines would look jagged, edges would shimmer, it was gross. Now, if you take an image that's 300px wide and tell the browser to display it as a 200px wide image it looks almost as good as the original.

Here's a real life example, the following two images have been scaled down from their original size in a browser (which I then grabbed with a screen capture), the top one is Internet Explorer 7 and the bottom is Firefox 3. Firefox 2 looks just as crappy as IE7 while Apple's Safari has always had good image rendering and looks more like the bottom example.

Unfortunately, if you do choose to run the beta version, hardly any of your extensions will work. I haven't found it to be a big issue except that I don't have any of my del.icio.us bookmarks and I also need the developer's toolbar for work. As the first release approaches developers will start updating their extensions to work with FF3 but because the installation will replace Firefox 2 on your computer, if you can, it might be best to wait.

Edit: Just found a way to make your extensions work with Firefox 3 using the Nightly Tester Tools extension. It work but you might want to proceed with caution because it can screw up your installation to the point that it won't even start. If that does happen in the process of setting it up just start Firefox in safe mode and disable add-ons.