Mozilla rolled out its second beta release of Firefox 3 in less than a month with the goal of receiving feedback from developers on the browser’s core functionality. The Beta 2 release now available for download features builds for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in over 25 different languages.
“The next Milestone is Beta 3 scheduled for February,” explained Mozilla vice president of engineering Mike Schroepfer. “We’ll either do more betas or move to final release based on feedback from users and Web developers.”
Core Improvements
Mozilla is making several changes to Firefox that it hopes will compel more Internet users to try the free browser. For example, Firefox 3 sports improvements to the browser’s look and feel, including a full page zoom capability, one-click bookmarking, and a location bar that matches against the user’s history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles. In addition, Firefox 3’s menus display using Vista’s native theme.
Web-based applications, such as the user’s favorite e-mail provider, can now be used instead of desktop applications such as Outlook for handling “mailto:” links. And a new keyword tag function allows Firefox users to sort their bookmarks by topic.
Users can resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting their network connections. Or type in all or part of the title, tag, or address of a Web page to scan a list of matches from the browser’s personalized history and bookmarks.
Firefox 3’s security enhancements include antivirus integration in the download manager, version checking for insecure plug-ins, malware alerts, and better presentation of Web site identity and security. The content of Web pages suspected to be forgeries is no longer shown. And bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences are now protected from system crashes through storage in a new database format.
The Acid2 Test
For its part, Microsoft says…