5 Things You'll Love About Firefox 3
Firefox 3 Beta 2 shows some nifty new tools we can expect in Mozilla's next browser.
New versions of favorite applications are always a little tricky; you want to keep up with the times without fixing what ain't broke. With that in mind, I took a look at the newly released Firefox 3 Beta 2 to see what we can look forward to when the final version ships in 2008.
Although the basic look of the browser hasn't changed, there are actually quite a few new features coming. (For a complete list, you can check out Mozilla's release notes.)
[Improved in Beta 2!] Firefox 3 Beta 2 includes approximately 900 improvements over the previous beta, including fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements. Many of these improvements were based on community feedback from the previous beta.
Some of the new features in Firefox 3 are not immediately obvious -- at least, not to the casual user. Among other things, Mozilla is incorporating new graphics- and text-rendering architectures in its browser layout engine (Gecko 1.9) to offer rendering improvements in CSS and SVG; adding a number of security features, including malware protection and version checks of its add-ons; and off-line support for suitably coded Web applications.