Brief Hands-On Report--Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 is Out

A beta release of the next generation of Mozilla's Firefox web browser is available for testing for those who like to try bleeding edge software that may have bugs. Firefox 3.0b1 is available for download via MacUpdate.com.

According to the Release Notes,

Firefox 3 Beta 1 is based on the new Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 27 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.

See the Release Notes for more detail.

We downloaded and installed Firefox 3.0b1 over Firefox 2.0.0.9 with no problem. Unfortunately, our favorite theme Nautipolis has not been updated for this beta. We have been using the new version all morning, including doing some online banking, without encountering any problems. [Bill Fox]