Warning : FIREFOX 3, BETA 1 is for developers only and should be used for testing only. Firefox three is not officially launched. You got to wait some more time, before we developers fix the bugs in this build. Unless you are sure, do not download this version of firefox. (I am not linking now..)

I am a voracious firefox user, and i am really excited to see a new release of the firefox. Firefox 3, beta 1 is released, and it looks pretty cool. I did spend some time in looking through the nightly builds of the firefox 3, and i tried to participate in development of firefox, but you always know - time is a big constraint.

Any way, lets see, what has firefox 3, got to offer to its users. Before i get started, you must understand that its been a year since firefox 2 released and it was then already too good. So, not much can be improved. Still i feel something has been done.

1. The startup time seems to be better than before. This is the only drawback this browser precesses, in comparison to the other standard non-compliant browser.

2. This one would have been a pretty good news, had it been done a couple of years ago. Firefox 3 seems to occupy less memory than before. But with memory almost no longer a constraint, this is trivial. Anyway an improvement is a improvement. An open firefox window with four tabs loaded (google.com) shows lesser memory compared to its counterpart.

3. The address bar comes in with a handy bookmarking tool and will enable users to bookmark in one touch. Extremely similar to the bookmark star, present in the google bookmarks.

4. There is a new easy navigation menu in the bookmarks toolbar, and it may come extremely handy listing the recently opened pages to the most visited pages.

5. The options menu seems to have shrunk a bit. (i see lesser options in safari though) . There is a new application tab in the options menu, which will let users choose how firefox will handle different file types like a pdf doc for instance.

6. You might have used session restore addon to restore your existing tabs. This is now a inbuilt feature of firefox3. When you are done browsing for the day, do not close your tabs. Just close firefox and click on save and quit. This will store your current sessions and will restore the same when reopening firefox.

I have not used firefox 3 for more than an hour, at this moment, but i am really excited. You may have problems in using your old add-ons. It is not a tough task. I ll have another post on this.

Spread firefox - Don’t hurt the web. Leave it open Source.