There is no official release date as yet, but Mozilla's vice president of engineering announced on the Mozilla Developer Center blog that they are hoping for a release date in late May. Firefox has made big waves in the web browser market over the last few years and - according to a BBC blog by Rory Cellan-Jones - Mozilla Europe's President, Tristan Nitot claims it is getting close to a 30% share of the browser market. It seems that clear that Firefox has taken a big dent out of Microsoft's browser monopoly in the ongoing Firefox/Explorer battle.
Providing users with new and innovative features is what has kept Firefox ahead of the game, allowing it to compete with a browser that is already installed on most computers when purchased. It's no surprise to hear that there are a host of new features in the newest version.
As Firefox 3 is not available yet, we've been taking the latest Beta version (Firefox 3 Beta 5) for a test run. It's not perfect, but we'll presume that the few detectable problems will be ironed out for the final version.
They've been working hard at Mozilla. First of all, there are a number of performance improvements. Firefox has become somewhat sluggish over the years and the new version sees a much welcomed increase in speed. Some memory issues have been resolved making the new software less RAM intensive too. It also appears to run online applications such as those on Google Apps far faster than any other browser. This is not surprising as the development team Mozilla collaborated with Google to make this happen.
The history and bookmarks functions have been completely redesigned and there is a new internal search facility called the "Awesome Bar" which allows the user to search the URL's and page titles in the site history. The Awesome Bar is similar to a function that has been available on browsers such as Epiphany and Opera browsers for a while and has proved useful.
Firefox 3 is using the latest, Gecko 1.9 layout engine to render the display. This is technically a big improvement but the average home user may notice little difference. There are loads of other little changes and extras including a function to save the final state of your session so when you open it up it's as you left it, and better password saving functionality, both of which could prove useful to users.
Not all of the our extensions were compatible in the Beta version, so it'll be interesting to see how quickly extensions become usable in the new release - it could prove a major factor in delaying Firefox users in upgrading.
While it can be said that there are no can't-live-without features included, the full package is a great improvement on Firefox 2. Mozilla have made a lot of changes and innovations to the application but it's unlikely that anything will strike the casual user and make him or her go "wow!". However, the speed of the browser and its handling of web applications could make it a winner and it looks like Mozilla has again raised the bar for Microsoft.
