The update to the final release candidate of htmlArea went smoothly. Installation consisted of copying the new files into the existing htmlarea folder; testing consisted of hitting reload on the edit entry screen. That generated an error msg that was easily dealt with. The location of the software must be explicitly set in the htmlarea.js file, and that's what the error indicated. Other than that, the new version seems to work fine. Plugins that extend the functionality of htmlArea are supported, but I haven't tested any of them.

A couple of notes:

* the existing MT3 formatting tools are still visible; haven't tested them.
* htmlArea does seem to 'uglify' the code a bit; that's a shame.

Here's the obligatory screen shot showing it in action: