Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 Released

By Josh | December 18, 2007

Mozilla has released Beta 2 for Firefox 3.0. You can find the release notes here. I’ll list below some of the new features and fixes included in Beta 2.

Effective top-level domain (eTLD) service better restricts cookies and other restricted content to a single domain.
Better protection against cross-site JSON data leaks.
New Download Manager: the revised download manager makes it much easier to locate downloaded files, and displays where a file came from.
Integration with Linux: Firefox’s default icons, buttons, and menu styles now use the native GTK theme.
Location bar & auto-complete: type in all or part of the title, tag or address of a page to see a list of matches from your history and bookmarks; a new display makes it easier to scan through the matching results and find that page you’re looking for.
Smart Bookmarks Folder: quickly access your recently bookmarked and tagged pages, as well as your more frequently visited pages with the new smart bookmarks folder on your bookmark toolbar.
Places Organizer: view, organize and search through all of your bookmarks, tags, and browsing history with multiple views and smart folders to store your frequent searches.
Web-based protocol handlers: web applications, such as your favorite webmail provider, can now be used instead of desktop applications for handling mailto: links from other sites. Similar support is available for other protocols (Web applications will have to first enable this by registering as handlers with Firefox).
Speed: Major architectural changes (such as the move to Cairo and a rewrite to how reflowing a page layout works) put foundations in place for major performance tuning which have resulted in speed increases in Beta 2, and will show further gains in future Beta releases.
Memory usage: Over 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more. Developers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation. Beta 2 includes over 30 more memory leak fixes, and 11 improvements to our memory footprint.

It looks like they are getting some of the things fixed that people were complaining about, but I still doubt that most of it will be fixed when 3.0 is released. I personally am not going to download this beta release since I tried the last one, and I saw nothing special about it. I like to be able to use my addons and can’t use most of them with Beta!

Via Ghacks and Mozilla.