Mozilla Corp. announced the release of a beta version of Firefox 3.0 on Tuesday, bringing new features and enhanced performance to what already was a successful browser, with an increasing popularity and often preferred to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s internet designer, posted a series of features on the site’s official website of what he called a milestone release.

The new changes include a better presentation of website identity and security, including anti-virus integration in the download manager, it is now easier to use through its improved download manager search and resumable downloading, it has a richer personalization through one-click bookmarking system, a better customization of download actions, improved graphics, JavaScript 1.8 and improved performance.

At the same time, Beltzner warned: “We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 3 Beta 3 milestone release. It is intended for testing purposes only.” In the release notes, Mozilla developers highlighted the fact that “Firefox 3 Beta 3 is a developer preview release of Mozilla’s next generation Firefox browser.”

The release mainly targets Web developers for now, in order to gain feedback before the final version of Firefox 3 to be released. The improvements in Firefox 3, which is based on a new Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, includes approximately 1,300 changes that provide the browser with a better stability, performance and a new user interface.

Firefox initiated a task to improve memory usage that has been said to affect the overall performance of the computer, and that is exactly what the Beta 3 release is intended to do. According to the release notes on the official website, over 350 memory leaks have been plugged, while the new XPCOM cycle collector is set to eliminate many more.

“Developers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation. Beta 3 includes more than 50 improvements to memory use over the previous beta,” the release notes said.