Today Mozilla released their latest browser Firefox 3.0 beta 1. After running it for a while, the browser is MUCH faster. No bugs yet, other then the memory leak which has plagued users of FF since the browser first launched. The entire experience is improved. They’ve redesigned it to be cleaner, easier to access, and made things like bookmarks and saving passwords easier. Page zooming is really cool, and they finally have the ability to resume downloads perfected.

To the geeky crowd, the reason for the speed bump in rendering pages is that Firefox now is built from Gecko 1.9, a brand new version of engine for rendering HTML. Gecko 1.9 is primarily coded from Cairo, an open source vector graphics software library that can leverage hardware accelerated rendering.

It isn’t recommended that you download this if you are just a casual user, but from what I’ve seen it is stable enough to use as your main browser…and they are sure to release a few more updates in the coming weeks before it’s final public release.

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P.S. It is most likely that your extensions won’t work yet with the new beta. It takes time for the creators of these extensions to update the software….a large reason why there is a beta period. And yes, this beta is available for  OS X, or any other platform that Firefox runs on.