The Mozilla Foundation released its first Beta of Firefox 3 yesterday and the early reviews appear positive. The Beta release was supposed to be out in July, but there were a few problems.

Firebadger 3 promises lots of new features and a new interface. The Foundation claims that it will improve performance and reduce resource consumption. The browser is built on Firefox's new HTML rendering machine, Gecko 1.9, which uses an open source vector graphics software library called Cairo. Firefox 3 was supposed to contain a storage framework called Places, which uses an SQLite database rather than flat files, and unifies bookmark and history storage. It is not quite finished in this Beta version.

The Beta is better at file downloading, too, as the download manager user interface has been redesigned. It has a search text box for filtering completed downloads and can work better with AV software. It seems that it can also pick up aborted downloads. There are also password saving buttons at the top, which will save lots of time in which the user must repeatedly input them.

More here.