Mozilla is making headway with the development of Firefox 3.0. While Microsoft is only scheduled to showcase the first features of Internet Explorer 8 in early March, at the MIX08 conference in Las Vegas, courtesy of Dean Hachamovitch, IE General Manager, with the initial public beta for the successor of Internet Explorer 7 planned by mid 2008, the third Beta of Firefox 3.0 is now available for download. The move comes as promised, with Mozilla having frozen Firefox 3.0 Beta 3 since late January, and having made the first Release Candidate builds of the Beta 3 of the open source browser since the past week.

"Firefox 3 Beta 3 is now available for download. This is the eleventh developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3. We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 3 Beta 3 milestone release. It is intended for testing purposes only. Testers can download Firefox 3 Beta 3 builds for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in over 30 different languages," Mozilla revealed.

Firefox 3.0 Beta 3 comes to the table with no less than 1,300 individual changes, marking the evolution from Beta 2 build. In this regard, Mozilla has informed that the open source browser features enhancements for stability, performance and memory usage. Additionally, Firefox 3.0 delivers, under the hood platform, improvements as well as a revamped user interface.

"New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include improved security features such as: better presentation of website identity and security including support for Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager. As well as improved ease of use through: easier add-on discovery and installation, improved download manager search and progress indication in the status bar, resumable downloading, full page zoom, and better integration with Windows Vista, Mac OS X and Linux," Mozilla added.

Firefox 3.0 Beta 3 expands the personalization capabilities of the open source browser permitting end users to perform one-click bookmarking, and improving the management flexibility of smart bookmark folders. Having reached the Beta 3 stage, Mozilla will now move forward with the delivery of Firefox 3.0 Beta 3.

But Firefox 3.0 Beta 3 also includes "improved platform features such as: new graphics and font rendering architecture, JavaScript 1.8, major changes to the HTML rendering engine to provide better CSS, float-, and table layout support, native web page form controls, colour profile management, and offline application support. And performance improvements such as: better data reliability for user profiles, architectural improvements to speed up page rendering, over 350 memory leak fixes, a new XPCOM cycle collector to reduce entire classes of leaks, and reductions in the memory footprint."

Firefox 3.0 Beta 3 can be downloaded from here.