From the Newsdesk

First look: Firefox 3 beta 2 officially released

By Ryan Paul | Published: December 19, 2007 - 08:14AM CT

Mozilla's quality standards for betas require that all of the planned features be fully implemented and robust enough for daily browsing by a large number of people. That standard was fulfilled last month by the Milestone 9 release, which was the first to bear the beta designation. Additional betas will be released on a consistent basis until all of the implemented features are finalized and performance matches or exceeds that of Firefox. At that point, Mozilla will transition to release candidates to resolve last-minute regressions before the official release.

The download manager was completely rewritten for Firefox 3 to include support for searching through previous downloads and resuming downloads between sessions. All of those features were included in the previous beta, but the download manager continues to gain subtle usability improvements. In this release, the domain of the site from which the file originated is displayed next with each entry in the download manager.

The new Firefox visual styles for Windows and Mac OS X haven't landed yet, but this beta is the first release to include the new Linux visual refresh. On Linux, Firefox will now adopt stock icons from the user's GNOME icon theme and use additional icons from Tango in cases where stock icons aren't available. The new default Firefox theme for Linux also closely conforms to the user's default GTK theme. The improvement is so profound that one can hardly distinguish Firefox from conventional GNOME applications. For the first time ever, Firefox truly looks like a part of the GNOME desktop. I've written extensively about many aspects of the Linux visual refresh and plan to do a followup in the near future.

The location bar auto-complete feature has gotten even smarter in the latest beta. Auto-completion will work on page titles, addresses, or tags. The auto-complete user interface, which has also been improved, will now underline the matching part of the address. The Places system got some improvements too. History and tags are now directly accessible through the Places Organizer, which can be accessed by selecting Show All Bookmarks from the Bookmarks menu.

In addition to usability enhancements, Firefox 3 beta 2 also delivers better performance and a reduction in memory overhead. During the Firefox 3 development cycle, over 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged and many more are eliminated by the new XPCOM cycle collector. In beta 2, more than 30 additional memory leaks have been fixed, and there have been 11 improvements to the Firefox memory footprint. Mozilla also says that performance is better in beta 2 as a result of performance tuning that was made possible by architectural changes.

Overall, it's another very impressive release that reflects the rapidly-growing robustness of Firefox 3. I've been using the nightly builds as my primary browser for some time, and I've been very happy with many of the new features. The quality of beta 1 was so high that it even managed to convert a few skeptics. The second beta further refines the experience and brings us closer to the release candidates.