Firefox 3 Beta 3 has been released

The third beta of the upcoming browser Firefox 3 has been released by the Mozilla Firefox team and is available for download in all supported languages and for all three operating systems on the official website. The setup file has a size of 6.65 Megabytes in Windows and downloads are astonishingly fast if you consider that Mozilla servers are normally overrun and crawling whenever a new Firefox release hits the net.

There have been a lot of fixes in the background and several new features and looks that are worth taking note of. Finally the new add-ons manager has been integrated which means that you can search and download new add-ons from within it. The new download manager comes to my mind as well adding more transparency to that process.

I guess I still prefer to use Download Statusbar instead if the author decides to port his add-on to Firefox 3. The speed of rendering webpages has been noticeably improved and more than 90 memory leaks have been fixed. Firefox 3 Beta 3 seems to render websites much faster than Firefox 2 does.

Two new security features have been added as well. One is a malware protection which warns the user if he visits a flagged website. The other new feature is called One-click site info which displays information like the site owner if you click on the website’s favicon.

For a list of all changes check out the release notes. Please note that this is still a beta release published for testing purposes.