It seems Mozilla Firefox RC1 is out. I don't see it on the Mozilla page, but my 2.0 beta 2 updated to RC1.
The new theme introduced in beta 2 is a little bit changed.

Got it thanks Eldmannen.

Mozilla site said it wouldn't be available on the download sites until late afternoon US time, but Filehippo has it posted early morning. I installed it from there this morning. My 'About' just says 2.0 - anyone else's show different, or is there another way to tell?

I just updated and now the About says 2.0. Before it said Firefox 2.0 b2 I believe so it looks like your update was successful.

Thanks Eldmannen for posting about the update. For some reason it didn't come up automatically when Firefox started like the other updates did.

i still dont get whats the difference between this RC1 and beta crap.

I think the difference is that a beta still has known bugs and/or is expected to have some major changes before its final release and an RC is considered very close to the final release version. I guess sometimes they're wrong though and have to release an RC2 or RC3, etc.

The funny thing about this update is I installed it and checked to make sure it updated. Then while using it later after it was restarted it was back to version 2.0 Beta 2. Not even sure how that could happen. I reinstalled the update and it's back to 2.0 [RC1} so hopefully it's OK now .

Yes, my say that too.



Yeah, it didn't automatically come up for me either, I clicked on Help -> Check for Updates... and surprise there it was.



RC1 is release candidate. RC is what is before the final release. Mozilla Firefox 2.0 is a major release, and it is important that it works very well, thats why it needs release candidates and betas. During the release candidate stage, software usually go into a "feature freeze" which means no new features are added, just bug fixes. Difference from RC1 and beta 2 is that the theme is improved, and some bugs are fixed.
Oh, and it's not crap. Firefox rules!

thanks for that explanation and i didnt mean FF was crap. i meant the RC and beta stuff.

so in other words, it will be much safer if i just downloaded it when the full version comes out?

That seems to be the case with a lot of software [I heard that Vista RC1 was a disaster ] but I've been using Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 for a long time and haven't had any problems and a lot of people on the forum have said the same thing and RC1 has been working well so far, too.

One thing with using updated versions of Firefox is that often some of the previously installed extensions become incompatible and are disabled until there are updates for them. Beta 2 and RC1 automatically check for compatibility updates at startup and most [not all, like RIP hasn't been updated for a while] seem to be updated fairly quickly.

Some people however do not recommend using anything but final releases.

Yes, as always with beta software it have not been tested very much yet, so it can be unstable or operate in unexpected ways.
Business companies often avoid betas. But I am confident in Firefox, I don't worry. Sometimes the last release candidate is the same as the final release. Example, RC3 of OpenOffice.org was the same as the final release of OpenOffice.org, they just removed the RC3 part.