TechJunction

Mozilla has released beta 3 of Firefox 3.0, with around 1300 ‘individual changes’ from beta 2, with fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements.

Firefox 3.0 beta 3 is here, with plenty of improvements set to send Firefox’s percentage of market share soaring ever higher once the final version is released to the public.

Mozilla says that there are around 1300 individual changes from the previous beta, “including fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements”.

While downloadable by anyone, Mozilla cautions that “beta releases are geared toward Web developers and Mozilla’s testing community in order to gain feedback before advancing to the next stage in the release process”.

That said, Mozilla heartily encourages ‘testers’ to download and install the Beta 3 release to test it against the websites they normally visit, and provide feedback about any incompatibilities, either through the Mozilla feedback form or through the Bugzilla form.

Having had a quick look at the latest version, the interface certainly looks snazzier, performance seems to be faster and all-in-all, Firefox 3.0 is shaping up to really give Internet Explorer 7 and even bigger run for its money than it has already given, while Microsoft continues dithering around with Internet Explorer 8.

So, what precisely do Mozilla say you’ll find in Firefox 3.0 beta 3?

Mozilla has detailed some of the 1300 changes you’ll find in the latest beta, but don’t worry, we’re only going to list the most important ones they singled out here – not all 1300!

To start with, Mozilla says that Firefox is even more secure than before, and without doubt, that’s a very good thing.

There’s the ‘One-click site info’ feature, where you click the ‘site icon’ in the location bar to see who owns the site and to check if your connection is protected from eavesdropping. There’s also built-in malware protection which ‘warns users when they arrive at sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware’.

Next up is improved ease of use. Here we find a new download manager which Mozilla says makes it ‘much easier to locate downloaded files, and displays the file’s source’.

Podcasts and Videocasts can be associated with your media playback tools, while Firefox 3.0’s new ‘native look and feel’ means that ‘new icons, themes and new platform-specific features make Firefox 3 look like a native application on all major operating systems’.

Then there’s the ‘more personal’ section. Here we start with a new ‘star icon’, which lets you quickly add bookmarks from the location bar with a single click, while  a second click lets you file and tag them.

A built-in ‘tags’ feature lets you associate keywords with your bookmarks to sort them by topic. A new ‘smart location bar & auto-complete’ feature lets you ‘type in all or part of the title, tag or address of a page to see a list of matches from your history and bookmarks’, while a new display ‘makes it easier to scan through the matching results and find that page you’re looking for’.

There’s also an ‘improved search algorithm’ within which ‘calculates the recency and frequency of a visit’ to come up with a frecency score (sic) that is used to ‘determine the most relevant results’.

For those that love their Firefox add-ons, the add-in manager ‘can now be used to download and install a Firefox customization from the thousands of Add-ons available from our community add-ons website’.

So, what about that improved performance we’ve been promised?

Firefox 2.0 has always, to me at least, seemed a bit slower than IE7, and at times that has annoyed me for the few microseconds longer that Firefox took to display a page.

So it’s great to see that Firefox 3.0 beta 3 has speed improvements thanks to ‘major architectural changes’ to put ‘foundations in place for major performance tuning which have resulted in speed increases that continue to increase page drawing speed in Beta 3’.

Mozilla says that these changes include ‘the move to Cairo and a rewrite to how reflowing a page layout works’.

There’s also the topic of memory usage, where a whopping 350+ ‘individual memory leaks have been plugged’, while a ‘new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more’.

However we can expect even more from the final version of Firefox 3.0, with developers continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation.

In total, Mozilla says that Firefox 3.0 Beta 3 includes ‘more than 50 improvements to memory use over the previous beta’ – hooray for that!

So, Firefox 3.0 really looks like being a major improvement that any existing Firefox user will race to download once the final version is ready, unless you just can’t wait and want to be part of the beta testing process now.

Microsoft – you’d better hurry up with IE8, and it’d better be pretty spectacular, or you’ll find yourself outsmarted, outplayed, outwitted and outbrowsered by foxiest Firefox yet!

Firefox 3.0 beta 3 released via  itwire