Mozilla have announced the release of Firefox 3.0 Beta 1, the ninth major development release of the Firefox 3.0 product.
Firefox 3 Beta 1 is now available for download. This is the ninth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso.
New features cited in Firefox 3.0 include various security enhancements, a new download manager supporting resumable downloads, tagging bookmarks for better organisation, a 'Smart Places' folder for accessing recent and favourite sites and many bug fixes over the 2.0 series.
Of course, Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 is exactly that - beta-quality software, so it may crash, break things and eat your data. I recommend everyone who does give this a try to back up their profile folder before installing.
Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and can be downloaded from this page.
