14 DAY TRIAL // While Microsoft is playing around, drawing happy yellow faces with the help of an internal build of Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla made available on December 18th, the second Beta of its upcoming Firefox 3.0 browser. Formerly codenamed Gran Paradiso, Beta 2 is a clear indication of the close proximity of Firefox 3.0's final version, due in early 2008. Beta 2 comes to the table with a luxurient list of improvements.
According to Mozilla, in the past 28 months since the new Gecko 1.9 web rendering platform debuted into development, approximately 2 million lines of code changes have been implemented in the browser. In this manner, in excess of 11,000 problems have been scraped from the open source browser. Firefox 3.0 is built on top of the Gecko 1.9 platform and, as such, will benefit from enhancements in terms of performance, stability and sustainability.
"Firefox 3 Beta 2 includes approximately 900 improvements over 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 revealed.
Security-wise, Firefox 3.0 permits the users to access additional information about a website, by clicking the favicon in the location bar. This feature is intimately connected with added support for Extended Validation SSL certificates, although in this aspect, Firefox has to play catch up with Internet Explorer 7, which has already offered support for EV SSL.
Firefox 3.0 will also manage SSL certificates more drastically, as well as the pages that are suspected to be spoofed. The open source browser comes with integrated malware protection that will single out websites known to deliver malicious code, and it will work closely with any security solution installed, when it manages downloads of executable files. Two security features have been improved in Beta 2: "Effective top-level domain (eTLD) service better restricts cookies and other restricted content to a single domain. And better protection against cross-site JSON data leaks", Mozilla revealed.
Usability is a big plus in Firefox 3.0. Users will have a range of new options available, from saving the opened tabs, to tab scrolling and quickmenu, full page zoom, resumable downloading, streamlined password management and add-on installation. Also, two new features are offered with a little extra kick as of Beta 2: "New Download Manager: the revised download manager makes it much easier to locate downloaded files, and displays where a file came from. Integration with Linux: Firefox's default icons, buttons, and menu styles now use the native GTK theme", Mozilla added.
Users will notice that Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 has made it easier for them to access, create and discover bookmarks. From the new Star bottom that simplified to a minimum the process of adding bookmarks, to location bar & auto-complete, and to the Smart Bookmarks Folder and Places Organizer, bookmark management is simply taken to a whole different level.
And last, but definably not least, Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 was kicked into high gear, with boosted performance, speed and memory usage. "Speed: Major architectural changes put foundations in place for major performance tuning which have resulted in speed increases in Beta 2, and will show further gains in future Beta releases. Over 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more. Developers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation. Beta 2 includes over 30 more memory leak fixes, and 11 improvements to our memory footprint", Mozilla concluded.