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Notwithstanding Mozilla's disclaimers that the version 3 pre final release builds are for "testing" and developer evaluation only, I haven't encountered any reason with any of the version 3 Firefox betas not to use them for regular, workaday browsing, although users of the latest released version of Firefox should not expect all of their add-ons to work properly with this preview release.
According to Mozilla.org, Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 33 months. Building on the previous release, Gecko 1.9 has more than 14,000 updates including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. Firefox 3 has been built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot more under the hood to offer website and Firefox add-on developers.
Firefox 3 for Mac has a much-improved and more attractive user interface with a more native Mac OSX look, smaller buttons and more compact tabs. The only visual change I notice from Firefox 3 beta 5 is that the address/button bar is a bit shallower and smaller.
Also new in Firefox 3 is One-click site info. JUst click the site favicon in the location bar, and an information dialog appears.
If that doesn't provide enough info., click the More Information button and a window appears with 4 tabs containing a whole raft of data pertaining to the page you're on, allowing you to check if your connection is protected from eavesdropping. Identity verification is prominently displayed and easier to understand. When a site uses Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, the site favicon button will turn green and show the name of the company you're connected to.
Firefox 3's location bar autocomplete now looks on visited and bookmarked page titles and tags as well as web addresses, and highlights which parts of the page title and/or URL match the entered text. Results for autocomplete are shown in two lines: one for page title and the other for web address, and in contrasting colors making it easier to isolate one or the other depending on what you're looking for. Also, matched terms are highlighted to direct attention.
The new Smart Location feature incorporates an improved search algorithm that “calculates the recency and frequency” of sites visited to help yield search results of highest relevancy. You can also associate keywords with bookmarks to sort them by topic.
The downloads manager has also been improved (although I still think Opera has the best downloads manager in the business), with support for searching through previous downloads, resuming downloads between sessions, and it now displays the domain of the source site next to each completed download. Users can now resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting your network connection. The Places feature, which organizes bookmarks and browser history, has also been enhanced, offering improved search functionality and a new Smart Bookmarks folder on the Bookmarks Toolbar.
It is now possible to search History, tags and bookmarks with a real, configurable search interface, and the Mac OS X version of Firefox 3 now has full support for native widgets in forms.
Probably my favorite new feature in Firefox 3 is that before shutting down Firefox puts up a dialog asking if you want to save the contents of tabs in your current browsing session. In most instances I definitely do, and the icing on the proverbial cake is that the tabs get reloaded from the cache, which no longer gets dumped on shutdown if you choose the save option with satisfying dispatch upon starting the program again. This is a big enhancement from Firefox 2's ability to remember the contents of tabs after program crashes.
Security Enhancements include:
Malware Protection: malware protection warns users when they arrive at sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware.
New Web Forgery Protection page: the content of pages suspected as web forgeries is no longer shown.
New SSL error pages: clearer and stricter error pages are used when Firefox encounters an invalid SSL certificate.
Add-ons and Plugin version check: Firefox now automatically checks add-on and plugin versions and will disable older, insecure versions.
Secure add-on updates: to improve add-on update security, add-ons that provide updates in an insecure manner will be disabled.
Anti-virus integration: Firefox will inform anti-virus software when downloading executables.
Vista Parental Controls: Firefox now respects the Vista system-wide parental control setting for disabling file downloads.
Enhanced Ease Of Use:
Easier password management: an information bar replaces the old password dialog so you can now save passwords after a successful login.
Simplified add-on installation: the add-ons whitelist has been removed making it possible to install extensions from third-party sites in fewer clicks.
Full page zoom: from the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images, or optionally only the text size. Your settings will be remembered whenever you return to the site.
Tab scrolling and quickmenu: tabs are easier to locate with the new tab scrolling and tab quickmenu.
Save what you were doing: Firefox will prompt users to save tabs on exit.
Optimized Open in Tabs behavior: opening a folder of bookmarks in tabs now appends the new tabs rather than overwriting.
Plugin management: users can disable individual plugins in the Add-on Manager.
Integration with the Mac: the new Firefox theme makes toolbars, icons, and other user interface elements look like a native OS X application. Firefox also uses OS X widgets and supports Growl for notifications of completed downloads and available updates. A combined back and forward control make it even easier to move between web pages.
Improved Features for Developers
New graphics and font handling: new graphics and text rendering architectures in Gecko 1.9 provides rendering improvements in CSS, SVG as well as improved display of fonts with ligatures and complex scripts.
Color management: (set gfx.color_management.enabled on in about:config and restart the browser to enable.) Firefox can now adjust images with embedded color profiles.
Offline support: enables web applications to provide offline functionality (website authors must add support for offline browsing to their site for this feature to be available to users).
Improved Performance
Speed: improvements to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimizations have resulted in continued improvements in performance. Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3, and the popular SunSpider test from Apple shows improvements over previous releases.
Memory usage: Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox 3 over a web browsing session. Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned.
System requirements:
Mac OS X 10.4 and later
Minimum Hardware
Macintosh computer with an Intel x86 or PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processor
128 MB RAM (Recommended: 256 MB RAM or greater)
200 MB hard drive space
Download:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-rc.html
For more information, visit:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0rc1/releasenotes/
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