Mozilla has today released the first beta of their next generation browser Firefox 3. I have browsed through the Release Notes and there is a couple of things I find interesting. First of all there are some nice security enhancements but the one that really got me interested was this one:

• Vista Parental Controls: Firefox now respects the Vista system-wide parental control setting for disabling file downloads.

For me this means that Firefox will have an overall better integration with Vista and not only in the look&feel area that we already saw in some prior posts by Mozilla bloggers. This is reaffirmed in another note:

• Integration with Vista: Firefox’s menus now display using Vista’s native theme.

There is some integration with Mac OS X and also linux which is a very good thing. Other cool new features I noticed:

• Simplified add-on installation: the add-ons whitelist has been removed making it possible to install extensions from third-party sites in fewer clicks.
• New Download Manager: the revised download manager makes it much easier to locate downloaded files.

The download manager even supports resuming downloads after you closed Firefox and opened it again. Also upon closing Firefox will prompt you whether you want to save your open tabs. This is a very nice feature as I never got to understand how the current Firefox saves the tabs and under what conditions.

The last part that was interesting to me is about performance. Now Firefox has some nice performance but I among many suffer from the Memory Usage problem. If I have Firefox open the whole day ( and believe me I do) it starts eating up my memory at some point till it allocates more then 500 Mb. At that point the only thing that helps is a complete restart of Firefox which don’t like doing. According to the notes they fixed quite a lot of memory leaks so I am hoping they fixed this as well.

Overall the beta looks really nice and I’ll be watching the development.