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The installer frustratingly insists on writing over your existing copy of Firefox, which is hardly an incentive to try out the Beta version. Even more discerningly, the first thing that you notice is that it looks almost exactly the same as previous versions.

In fact, most of the improvements in Firefox 3 are incremental rather than revolutionary. The new download manager includes a handy search box to help track down downloaded files, but the pause and resume features, which now sport media player-style buttons, crashed each time we tried to use them.

Rendering pages seems to be slightly faster than under version 2, thanks in no small part to the new Gecko rendering engine used behind the scenes. The performance boost is most noticeable when using web applications such as Flickr, GMail or Bloglines.

With the updated version of GMail the speed boost is particularly noticeable; in fact, on our test PC emails loaded far quicker than under Microsoft Outlook.

Under the hood, Gecko 1.9 provides rendering improvements in CSS and SVG, improved display of fonts with ligatures and complex scripts, and more accurate image display with support for colour profiles.

One interesting new security feature is the website information

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box that can be displayed by clicking the site icon in the location bar. This displays who owns the site and will, in future versions, also show Extended Validation SSL certificate information.

Building extensions

Firefox 3 will automatically check add-ons and plug-ins, and disable older, insecure versions. Unfortunately, many popular plug-ins such as the GMail Manager aren't currently supported, although many developers will now be busy recoding their extensions. Installing extensions should be easier though, as the add-ons whitelist has been removed, reducing the number of clicks needed.

An information bar, similar to the old pop-up blocker, replaces the password dialog, so you can now easily save passwords after a successful login. And for those having difficulty reading from the screen, a new zoom feature enables whole pages and their content to be enlarged for easier and detailed viewing, while the Location and Search bar size can now be customised with a resizer.

One very welcome addition is the ability to quickly save a selection of open tabs. When you close Firefox you get a dialog box asking you if you want to save your session. Clicking yes will instructs Firefox to reload all open tabs when the browser is next run.

Other new features include bookmark tagging, address auto-completion that draws on bookmarks and a new Organizer for bookmarks and browsing history.

Overall, the browser has a similar look and feel, but does seem to run faster and smoother. The reason for this, claims Mozilla, is that it has patched more than 300 individual memory bugs. Firefox 3 beta 1 is a free download, available here.