Firefox 3 Beta 3 Released

Firefox 3 Beta 3 is a developer preview release of Mozilla's next generation Firefox browser and is being made available for testing purposes only.

These beta releases are targeted to Web developers and our testing community to gain feedback before advancing to the next stage in the release process. The final version of Firefox 3 will be released when we qualify the product as fully ready for our users. Users of the latest released version of Firefox should not expect their add-ons to work properly with this beta.

This beta will give you a taste of what's coming in Firefox 3, but there's still more to come, and much of what you'll see may still be a bit rough around the edges.

Please see below for an extensive list of features and enhancements found in Firefox 3 Beta 3, as well as known issues and frequently asked questions.

What's New in Firefox 3

Firefox 3 is based on the new Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 30 months and includes nearly 2 million lines of code changes, fixing more than 12,000 issues. Gecko 1.9 includes some major re-architecting for performance, stability, correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. Firefox 3 has been built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot under the hood to offer website and Firefox add-on developers.

Firefox 3 Beta 3 includes approximately 1300 individual changes from 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.

Mozilla provides Firefox 3 Beta 3 for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X in a variety of languages. You can get the latest version of Firefox 3 Beta 3 here. For builds for other systems and languages not provided by Mozilla.org, see the Contributed Builds section at the end of this document.

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