Why am I testing it now? When there have been betas of firefox 3 out for weeks now? Well I thought it would be a good opportunity to perhaps show some of the early features as they start to appear and (hopefully) the version a few weeks on should be a little less "buggy" and a bit easier to review.

So what are the differences between the current stable V2 and the new V3? Well there has been a lot of talk about the "native" interface Firefox is going to adopt. And to be fair, it is a welcome addition as users of Vista will probably testify, Firefox doesn’t fit in with the OS at all. It has similar problems in linux with almost looking like it was shoe-horned into the UI. But it is important not to miss the point with Firefox - there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes too.

One of the problems the Mozilla team are addressing is the huge amounts of memory, on occasion, Firefox consumes. If you leave it running for hours and hours, it’s footprint will grow and grow. There were also mentions of memory leaks - more prevalent in Firefox 1.0, but still visible in Firefox 2.0 and because of this the odd crash is kind of expected. Even though the team don’t really admit to memory leaks, I’m sure there will be less come the final release.

Another cool feature of Firefox 3, is the ability to suggest websites from past history and bookmarks stored in the browser when you start to type in the location bar. Firefox kind of does this already, if you start to type "toy" it will give you a list of recently visited websites that begin with "toy." However Firefox 3 will be doing a text search for anything containing "toy" plus any bookmarks you have that may contain "toy." Nifty feature that I’m sure most of us won’t even notice - and even if we do it will be so natural we’ll soon forget.

Talking about natural, the downloads window has had a welcome facelift too. You will find useful information buttons which give you information about the file - where it came from, where you saved it. Useful stuff indeed if you change your save location every time you download something. And if you download a lot, there’s a useful search box too. Of course a download manager with multiple connections would be nice but then maybe that’s being held off for the release version or Firefox 4!

Other things to be looked at include the language behind installing add-ons - making it a bit easier, and just making everything a bit slicker and smarter. It might just be me, because I’m concentrating on page load times now, but it does appear to render a little quicker.

I’ve always been a big fan of Firefox, and nothing has changed with my support. The project still looks as buoyant as ever, and if anything looks more community focused than it’s ever been. If you want to test Firefox, and I stress "test", it is compiled, normally, on a nightly basis. Please bare in mind that you’ll be lucky if 10% of your current add-ons will work at all. If you click the following link, you will get taken straight to the latest build, on Mozilla’s FTP server. [SHOW ME]