I know this is a little late and maybe even old news by now but Firefox 3 beta 1 has been released to the general public. This blog is not going to go in-depth of the new beta since in a large way you wont notice a HUGE amount of difference between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 as it is looking right now but what CAN you expect to see in this new version of Firefox? Well that is what I am going to shed some light on.

The first new thing you will notice upon starting Firefox is the icon next to the URL in the address bar now gets what looks like a button. When you move your cursor over it it turns into a hand. This lets you know that you can easily drag the icon somewhere, for example your bookmark toolbar, and create a bookmark or link to it. You can also drag the icon into text, like on this blog, and it will post the hyper-link, I can not recall if this was possible in earlier versions of Firefox.

The next cool nifty little feature is the star located to the right of the URL. This also works with a cool new folder in your toolbar named Places. The places folder lets you view websites you have recently visited, starred, tagged, and your most often visited web pages. These are all listed under the Places folder. Back to the star on the right URL. Clicking it once marks the page as starred, which than makes it appear in the starred websites under the places folder, think of it as a non permanent bookmark, clicking the star again however will open a little window that will let you name it and save it as a bookmark or delete the star all together.

There are a few other changes that I have noticed by just glancing around it quickly. The organize bookmarks link, or the bookmark manager, is now more nicely laid out and looks much more functional. The download manager now includes a search located at the bottom (was this in previous versions?) to quickly search out and locate past downloads. Also along with that the icons are nicer looking in the download manager. I imagine Firefox looks pretty at home on the latest versions of OS X and Vista with their nicer interfaces.

Overall first impressions that is about it… I do not notice anything significantly different from the previous version but rather updates and improvements on the old version. When it is released will it worth the upgrade? Oh yeah for sure, this is Mozilla we are talking about. Is it a huge update for the average user? No but the under the hood changes and nice little additions to the users experience will make it a nice update to the Firefox web browser.

TheDub