Firefox 3 Beta 3 has been release by Mozilla for development and testing purposes. The final version will probably arrive within a few months.
This is a significant update to Firefox with improvements across the board. The improvements are listed in the Release Notes and on the Mozilla blog.
Bookmark management, tabbed browsing, security and download management have all seen improvements. The layout engine has been updated to Gecko 1.9 which offers improved font and graphics rendering as well as increased performance.
There are user interface enhancements across all platforms, but the Mac OS X version has received the biggest facelift with the inclusion of a new Mac OS X theme.
There have been a lot of changes under the hood to improve memory management and performance. For web designers and developers that use Firefox quite literally all day for testing and debugging, this is great news.
Having tested out Firefox 3 Beta 3 on both Mac OS X and Windows I have to say that I'm very impressed. The rendering speed and performance improvements are very much apparent.
I can't wait for the final release!