Firefox 3 Beta 1

1st beta of Firefox 3 for Mac is out. Compared to earlier releases it has improved a lot in terms of bug fixes, looks and speed.

For a start Beta 1 doesn't crash. In addition to this 'insignificant' improvement there are few more:

Acid2

Good news for developers – Firefox now passes Acid2. Click here to take the test.

Rendering performance

A lot of speed in this release. Gran Paradisos didn't even come close and it actually seems faster than WebKit.

Smart cards

Version 2 of Firefox broke a lot of sites that employed smart card readers. Thankfully this is not the case in this build. Everything seems to work properly.

Looks

Like for the alphas, controls have got this Aqua feel now that all the macheads are used to. Toolbars don't exactly look like expected (see Firefox 3 going Macish) but you can spot the slight changes:

Lastly, no significant CSS developments. No Web Fonts. And there are still some rendering bugs, e.g. text-decoration.