After the early alpha development version of Firefox, Gran Paradiso (it was December 2006 if I’m not wrong), today Mozilla announced the first Firefox beta version.
Here you can find the full post which introduced the new Beta.

What’s new?

Well, looking at the “What’s new” page, it seems that there are tons of changes, fixes, improvements. I’m reporting here just a couple of things from that list:

• Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 27 months and includes nearly 2 million lines of code changes  (!!)
• 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
• Malware Protection: malware protection warns users when they arrive at sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware
• New Web Forgery Protection page: the content of pages suspected as web forgeries is no longer shown
• New SSL error pages
• Add-ons and Plugin version check: Firefox now automatically checks add-on and plugin versions and will disable older, insecure versions
• Secure add-on updates: to improve add-on update security, add-ons that provide updates in an insecure manner will be disabled (I hope this wont break half of the current extenions!).
• Anti-virus integration
• New Download Manager
• Resumable downloading
• Full page zoom
• Improved Platform for Developers (mmhhh.. this it’s interesting!)

Download Firefox 3 beta 1 now!