Firefox 3.0 Beta 3 release

Mozilla forwarded the following bit of news this evening:

Today, Mozilla announced the availability of Firefox 3.0 Beta 3, the third beta of the Firefox 3 open source browser.
 
Firefox 3 Beta 3 includes approximately 1300 individual changes from the previous beta, including fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements
 
Please note that this is a Beta release, and that developments and further enhancements to the browser will be incorporated into the final product. 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.

What’s new and improved in Firefox 3 Beta 3:
 
More Secure:

• One-click site info: Click the site icon in the location bar to see who owns the site and to check if your connection is protected from eavesdropping.
  
• Malware Protection: Malware protection warns users when they arrive at sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware.

Easier to Use:

• New Download Manager: The new Firefox download manager 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.
  
• Native Look and Feel: New icons, themes and new platform-specific features make Firefox 3 look like a native application on all major operating systems.

More Personal:

• Star icon: Quickly add bookmarks from the location bar with a single click; a second click lets you file and tag them.
  
• Tags: Associate keywords with your bookmarks to sort them by topic.
  
• Smart location bar & auto-complete: 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; a new display makes it easier to scan through the matching results and find that page you're looking for. New in Beta 3 is an improved search algorithm which calculates the recency and frequency of a visit to come up with a frecency score that is used to determine the most relevant results.
  
• Add-ons Manager: The Add-ons Manager (Tools > Add-ons) can now be used to download and install a Firefox customization from the thousands of Add-ons available from our community add-ons website.

Improved Performance:

• Speed: Major architectural changes (such as the move to Cairo and a rewrite to how reflowing a page layout works) put foundations in place for major performance tuning which have resulted in speed increases that continue to increase page drawing speed in Beta 3.
  
• Memory usage: Over 350 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more. Developers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation. Beta 3 includes more than 50 improvements to memory use over the previous beta.

For more details and the link to download, please view the DevNews post here.