The organisation said the beta was still “a bit rough”, but would let developers preview features and functions, and to get feedback before the project proceeds into its next phase.
“Much of the work leading up to this first beta has been around developing the infrastructure to support a bunch of exciting new features,” Mozilla said in its release notes.
“With this first beta, you'll get a taste of what's coming in Firefox 3, but there's still more to come, and much of what you'll see is still a bit rough around the edges.”
Rough edges include the fact that Firefox add-ons don't work properly with the beta version.
Those add-ons include applications such as ad blockers, search engines, and dictionaries in other languages. Mozilla did not offer a final release date, noting only that the final version will be launched “when we qualify the product as fully ready for our users.”
Mozilla has set out to make the Firefox 3 browser more personal, with a star button that lets you add bookmarks from the location bar with a single click. A “smart places” folder lets you access recently bookmarked and tagged pages, as well as more frequently visited pages.
New security features in Firefox 3 include malware protection, more informative SSL information, and a one-click function to identify who owns a site.
Firefox 3 automatically checks add-ons and will disable older, insecure versions. The browser even will inform anti-virus software when downloading executables, and it respects the Windows Vista parental control setting for disabling file downloads.
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