The second beta of Firefox 3.0 is now available for download. In this manner, Mozilla lived up to its promise made earlier in December that it would move Firefox 3.0 out of Beta 1 stage, by December 21st. Having dropped the first Release Candidate for Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 as early as December 11th, it was clear that Mozilla was making headway with the development of its upcoming version of the open source browser. The final availability date for Firefox 3.0 is not set at this point, with more beta milestones expected, but all indications point to early 2008.

"Firefox 3 Beta 2 now available for download. Please note: We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 3 Beta 2 milestone release. It is intended for testing purposes only. Firefox 3 Beta 2 is now available for download. This is the tenth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3", Mozilla revealed on its Development Center.

According to Mozilla, Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 marks quite an evolution, in comparison to its predecessor testing version. The new development milestone features almost 900 improvements over Beta 1. Mozilla has, in fact, tweaked a wide range of aspects of the open source browser, starting with the graphical user interface on the surface, and continuing under the hood with security, performance, stability memory usage and reliability enhancements.

"Firefox 3 is based on the new Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 28 months and includes nearly 2 million lines of code changes, fixing more than 11,000 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", reads a fragment of the Firefox 3 Beta 2 Release Notes.

Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 can be downloaded via this link.