Firefox 3 Beta 3

Beta 3 of Firefox 3 is now out. Quite a few new features and a new look.

New skin

Finally some nice interface improvements have hit us backing up the statement from October last year predicting that Firefox might be going Macish. And here it is looking very much like Safari:

Security

Mozilla has introduced Identity Verification with the company name you're connected to right in front of the location bar. That's for sites that use EV SSL certificates:

Also, there's now Malware detection that triggers on sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware:

Things gone easier

Beta 3 features renewed Download Manager. In addition to the advanced search, download progress is now displayed in the status bar as well:

Bookmarking has also improved. Wherever you are at you can now bookmark a page with a single click by clicking on a star that appears in the location bar (double click fires up the window with specs):

Typing into the location bar is now driven by the frecency score:

Performance

Beta 3 also introduces huge performance improvements with major architectural revisions. Over 90 changes have been made in addition to the ones in Beta 2 just to gain in performance. In addition to those 90 changes, over 350 individiual memory leaks have been plugged and memory use optimisation is ongoing.

As even Firefox 3 Beta 1 was significantly faster than any of the Firefox 2 releases, this is again a huge leap forward.