The first milestone beta version of Firefox 3 is out.  Mozilla recommend that only developers and testers install and play with it, which is fair enough I suppose.  Doesn’t me that we mere mortals can’t have a sneaky peek though…

It immediately seems to me to be faster.  Just that little bit zippier, with a bit more speed rendering pages.  Whether that’s my imagination I’m not sure – it’s not exactly the sort of delay that could easily be measured by a stopwatch – but you do get to feel that that significant work that they’ve done “under the hood” is resulting in some good.

Visually it looks cleaner, with Vista’s themes being used meaning that the close button (which I always put on the right hand side of the task bar, instead of on the tabs themselves – go to about:config and set “browser.tabs.closebuttons” to 3 instead of 1, if you want to o the same) looks a lot better than it did under Firefox 2 or Flock.

Google Mail renders as well as ever; Google haven’t upgraded me to version 2 yet though, which is supposed to crash FF2 a lot, so I can’t report on that unfortunately.

Overall, so far, performance is good.  It certainly feels faster than FF2 and Flock.  Any cool features or problems I find I will let you all know.  But so far, everything looks good.

Tags: Firefox3, beta