Firefox 3..

After a grueling Alpha development period that included no fewer than nine milestone releases, the first beta of Firefox 3 is now available for testing.

According to Mozilla developers, the Firefox 3 Beta 1 milestone fixes over 11,000 bugs and has almost 2 million lines of code changes in comparison with the current Firefox 2.x browser.

Beyond just bug fixes, Firefox 3 Beta 1 includes a long list of browsing, security, usability and performance improvements over the 2.x version of Firefox.

While Firefox 2.x includes the Google-developed Safe Browsing extension, Firefox 3 Beta 1 provides even greater protection with a one-click info button. All a user needs to do is click on the "favicon" (a 16x16 icon in the browser navigation bar that accompanies URLs) to get information on the identity and ownership of a site.