After the first beta release of the much-anticipated Firefox 3 Web browser which offers some nice enhancements over the previous version, Firefox 3 beta two is now available for testing. Though it doesn’t differ much from its predecessor’s functionality or looks but there are some major performance upgrade has brought. Since it’s a beta release there are still some known bugs, which obviously will be taken care off before Firefox 3’s anticipated debut.

Firefox 3 is based on the new Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform. Firefox 3 has been built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot of goodies to offer website and Firefox add-on developers. Firefox 3 Beta 2 includes approximately 900 improvements over the previous beta, including fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements. But still not yet ready for day to day use, unless off course you want to take the ride

Key improvements of Firefox beta 2:

1. Effective top-level domain (eTLD) service better restricts cookies and other restricted content to a single domain.
2. Better protection against cross-site JSON data leaks
3. New Download Manager: the revised download manager makes it much easier to locate downloaded files, and displays where a file came from.
4. Integration with Linux, Mac and Vista: Firefox’s default icons, buttons, and menu styles now use the native theme. In Mac Firefox now uses the OS X spellchecker and supports Growl for notifications of completed downloads and available updates.
5. Tags: associate keywords with your bookmarks to sort them by topic.
6. New Web Forgery Protection page: the content of pages suspected as web forgeries is no longer shown.
7. One-click site info: Click the site favicon in the location bar to see who owns the site. Identity verification is prominently displayed and easier to understand. In later versions, Extended Validation SSL certificate information will be displayed.
8. Speed and Memory usage: Major architectural changes (such as the move to Cairo and a rewrite to how reflowing a page layout works) put foundations in place for major performance tuning which have resulted in speed increases in Beta 2, and will show further gains in future Beta releases.

There are few other improvements and niche features that might attract your attention, check out the full list here. Mozilla’s this version mostly focused on security, performance and usability rather than fancy styles. Want to check out the features by yourself? Get the latest version of Firefox 3 Beta 2 here. But before you do that you should understand that beta releases are targeted to Web developers and our testing community to gain feedback before advancing to the next stage in the release process. You should not expect your old add-ons to work properly with this beta. There are also some bug issues like-

1. Yahoo Mail and Windows Live mail don’t work, you have to use classic version of those to check mail.
2. Web feeds served as text/html won’t load properly
3. MathML don’t render properly.
4. The malware protection blacklist is not currently activated

You can install and uninstall the Beta alongside Firefox 2; removing Firefox 3 Beta 2 won’t remove your bookmarks, web browsing history, extensions or other add-ons.

Overall we are looking forward to a great Firefox version with some mind blowing features to surf faster, safer and smoother.