Mozilla’s Firefox 3 (Beta 3) Released

By Nathan Statz

Month Date, 2008: The browser warfare shows no signs of letting up as Mozilla continues on its fast paced development cycle for Firefox by unveiling another public beta release, this time of Beta 3 version 3.

While this version comes with the usual disclaimer that it’s only for testing purposes and only testers and developers should apply, it is generating a large amount of hype and anticipation for the full release of Firefox 3.

According to a statement on the Mozilla Development Centre website, “This is the eleventh developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3”.

Some of the marquee features of the new release include improved security features, easier add-on discovery and installation, one-click bookmarking, improved platform features performance improvements. The full list of features and download locations for the new release are available here.

There is an air of anticipation around Firefox 3’s release and whether it will gain much in the way of browser share from the market leading Microsoft Internet Explorer, which is still in a dominant position but has faced stiff competition from a constant rise in popularity for Firefox. W3counter statistics show Firefox is closing in on the magical 30% mark with a 28.39% browser share to Internet Explorer’s 61.7% with Safari, Opera and other browsers rounding out the final statistics. Other more Firefox-skewed tracking websites, like w3schools show Firefox has reached 37.2% market share, though it clearly states that this is from a pool of users interested in web technologies, not what it refers to as the average user.

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