Few month ago I downloaded firefox 3 for the first time. At a time that was beta 1. Now there’s a beta 2 version available. I must say that comparing to beta 1 it is much improved. There are less crashes and I can confirm that some sites that were problematic with beta 1 sites are now much better. Also, finally some extensions start to pop-up. For instance my favorite gmail notifier already available for FF3 and kicking ass

Comparing to good old Firefox 2, FF3 has some nice features although I cannot say that it is a breakthrough. In my opinion, greatest improvement in Firefox 3 is overall browsing experience that got somehow better. Better memory management makes things run smoother. Zoom in and out in FF3 is much more smoother because it now enlarges the whole canvas instead of increasing font size. On the other hand, it increases the size of images yet lacks aliasing effect on images. As a result, when zooming in, images end up choppy. Hopefully this will be fixed in the final version.

Among new features, are new improved download manager and improvements in bookmark managing. Download manager expected to support suspension and resumption of a download. Also, downloads can now be searched through.
Bookmark management got kind of star sign for every web-site, similar to a star that google introduced in gmail – i.e. you mark a web-site with a special sign and then you can see the list of all marked web-sites. Another nice enhancement is URL bar that now can be sort of searched through. Finally, I heart that installing add-ons no longer require restart, although I cannot confirm this as too few add-ons are available for FF3 at the moment

To conclude this short review, I must say that after tabbed browsing I could not think of so many improvements that could be done to a web browser, yet Firefox managed to surprise. I think most of you will find upgrading worthwhile, although I wouldn’t be calling Firefox 3 a real breakthrough comparing to Firefox 2.

You can download the latest beta version from here.