Firefox 3, previously code named as Gran Paradiso, is now available in its nearly final form.

Mozilla Corporation on Friday released Firefox 3 RC1, more or less the final form of this iteration of the popular open-source Web browser. RC stands for Release Candidate and represents a stage in which the browser’s features are complete and the code is stable enough for public testing. Barring any serious bugs, RC1 will become the official release version of Firefox 3, which is planned for June.

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.

With over 15,000 new improvements ranging from squashed bugs to sealed leaks, Firefox is winning over our browsing hearts yet again. You can go ahead and give the newest version of Firefox a try before it’s officially released as stable.

Here at Geek Condition, the improvement we are most excited about would be the memory usage fixes! We all know that Firefox quickly gobbles up our computing power, more so than any other program that’s usually open at the same time. Mozilla has stated they have greatly improved this:

Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox 3 over a web browsing session. Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned.

As a warning though, some of your extensions may not work with Firefox 3 yet.