Today Mozilla began distributing a 2nd Release Candidate for Gran Paradiso (Firefox 3.0). The new Release Candidate comes just a week after developers were notified that a 2nd Release Candidate would be necessary due to a large amount of bugs in RC1.

Early last month Kayla wrote an article introducing RC1 and its key strengths over other browsers. If you are new to the world of Release Candidates you should check out her article here.

Although RC2 may come off as a setback, Mike Beltzner from Mozilla said, “we don’t expect that this will significantly impact our shipping date, and still estimate a mid-June release date.” You can see the fully-threaded statement here.

RC2 will be tested for the next 24 hours ending sometime tomorrow. Because RC2 is only being privately released at this time you will not see it when visiting the Mozilla Download page. For your convenience we’ve linked to the direct downloads for the following platforms:

English (US) [click to download]
MAC OS X - 3.0rc2
WINDOWS - 3.0rc2
LINUX - 3.0rc2

Organizing your medical history is extremely important and most people just assume that somewhere there’s a huge organized file with all their information. Unfortunately that’s not the case. Yes there is a ton of information but it isn’t held in any central location. Most medical records reside in the place at which you were treated or a main office located somewhere in another state. If you are involved in a medical emergency … there will be a scurry to obtain your medical records from the many different places you have received treatment. Organizing your medical data with Google will at least give you and your health professionals somewhere to start and then go and verify that data.

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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.

43 Folders. A different look into the minds of freelancers.
http://www.43folders.com/rss.xml

A List Apart. Since 1998 they’ve been promoting the proper use of web design methods. Their ideas are original and they’ve set in motion many critical layout standards.
http://www.alistapart.com/feed/rss.xml

AfterDawn. Optical Media meets Web 2.0.
http://rss.afterdawn.com/afterdawn_news.xml

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Urgent, Base One, we’re panning. The videos are panning. While watching the scenes I am bobbing side to side in my chair like an apple in a water pail in late October. And the music is pulling me into a mysterious force. Ok right, back to the real world now, what am I talking about? WorldWideTelescope.

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a Web 2.0 visualization software environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe.

Want to see the same images that scientists at NASA use for their research or perform your own research with those images? Or do you want to see the Earth from the same perspective that astronauts see as they descend to Earth? How about taking a 5 minute break and viewing a panorama of a different city? Install WWT and start your explorations.

From some of our favorites like seeing the Earth lit up at night, to the less traveled Eta Carina Nebula, cosmo geeks can get a heavy dose of the universe. (Provided you’re running Windows. Dual booters - confess!)