Firefox 3 beta 2 is scheduled to be released around the 21st of this month according to Mozilla Developer Center’s Dev News. I’ve been doing my own personal testing of the nightly builds which just changed to beta 3 this morning.

What I can tell you about this major upgrade to what’s slowly but steadily becoming the "tool of choice" for browsing the WWW (and even more so for the WordPress blogger) is that Firefox 3 is going to rock! No doubt about it. This is a major rebuild folks and chock full of new features. There’s a ton of new improvements and changes stuffed into the newest version of Firefox but a couple of major items, for me anyway, ranks right up there in the top five of "most excellent improvements":

• Bookmarks storage is no longer the static html file that it has always been but rather a dynamic SQLite database that can be easily leveraged and manipulated which promises no end of innovation when it comes to future bookmark extensions. For now, Firefox 3 will have it’s own built in tagging support so tags can be assigned to individual bookmarks. That plus a "metrics" type system that keeps track in real time of  sites visited, tags used, popular pages etc. An effective bookmark back up system is also part of the new features.   Anyone who’s familiar with any type of SQL database (like certain blogging platforms I could mention) knows what can be done with the features and functions of this type of database.
• Firefox 3 passes the Acid2 test. Once upon a time (like around ten years ago) there was an obscure little browser called Opera. You actually had to pay for this little gem back then if you wanted it free from ads but the really special thing about this small browser was it’s compliancy with the current web standards of that era. In other words…it passed the Acid test. In fact, it was the only browser available at that time that did and up until just recently was still the only browser that fully adhered to current web standards. Now here comes Firefox 3 and Opera finally has a companion in web standard compliance which of course leaves old Internet Explorer as the only browser in the "big three" that does not. Take a look for yourself (the smilie face must be rendered correctly in order to pass the test):

I just couldn’t resist showing the difference.

Another important change for Firefox that comes with the new version is security. According to SearchSecurity, Firefox 3 in it’s current beta release already exhibits many of the new security improvements that have gone into the new version. In today’s online world, better security measures in any browser are welcome indeed.

I’m not going to try and rehash a full review of the new browser since there’s plenty of those for beta 1 already. The bottom line here is that Firefox 3 in it’s final version is going to be a whole new animal while still maintaining it’s familiar feel and general functions that everyone is used to in Firefox 2. Even now in it’s current beta release, Firefox 3 has shown better overall stability than both Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 and it’s just plain fast. Sure, there’s still a several bugs hanging around beta 1 and a few left over in the upcoming beta 2 release but that’s what beta’s and testing is all about. There’s currently one more beta (3) scheduled for release sometime in February before the final version hits the streets in and around the first half of 2008. My guess would be sometime towards the end of the 1st quarter if testing for beta 3 comes clean.

Personally I’m looking forward to it. With Firefox 2, while still very usable, Mozilla appeared to have lost some of their focus. To me version 2 always seemed to have an "unfinished" quality to it. With Firefox 3, that "unfinished quality is gone, replaced by a much more mature, polished, smooth feeling to it that the browser hasn’t exhibited before. In my testing  over the past several weeks, it looks like Firefox has finally grown up. If Internet Explorer was slowly losing market share to this upstart of a browser previously, it better watch itself when version 3 rolls off the assembly line. It just might have enough horse power to pass IE and take the lead.