Firefox notified me that Firefox 2.0 RC1 was released tonight, and I promptly grabbed it. I’ve been running the Firefox 2 beta releases and they’ve been very nice improvements. This new release candidate is nicely polished (i.e. the icons aren’t fugly anymore) and stability has been good (which has been true of all of the Firefox 2 releases I’ve tested).

One catch: Firefox updates don’t seem to work right on Vista. You’ll restart Firefox only for Beta 2 to remain, and you’ll be befuddled. The culprit — of course — is User Account Control. Firefox doesn’t trigger a privilege elevation request when it restarts the program to install RC1, so it never gets installed.

The workaround is to right-click on Firefox’s shortcut, hit “Run as administrator,” confirm that you want to run Firefox with elevated privileges at the UAC prompt, and then check for updates within Firefox off the Help menu. It’ll download and install the RC1 update, and prompt you to restart Firefox. This time, it’ll work fine. I probably should file a bug for this one.

More reaction tomorrow. Time for BED!