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

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.