MOZILLA LOOKS TO THE FUTURE with this first beta release of Firefox 3. The browser is avail¬able in 20 languages and has versions that run on Linux, Mac,
and Windows machines. You won't see a shiny new interface or major new capabilities yet: Al¬though a few ease-of-use additions have found their way in, making surfing a tad smoother, this beta doesn't have the redesigned navigation ele¬ments slated for the final version. But beneath that same old skin beats an entirely new heart. The page-rendering engine is being completely revamped for performance and security.

Among the few interface changes you can see at this point, the Places icon is the most obvious. Clicking on it will give you quick access to pagcs that you've marked for later reference. The book¬mark manager is now called the Places Organizer, and it adds helpful search, backup, and preview functions. The Download Manager, which has been simplified, now lets you pause and resume. A less-intrusive password-filling feature places a bar below the address bar rather than popping up a dialog and lets you decide whether you want the browser to save a password after a successful log-in-definitelyan improvement.

Other enhancements seem to be works in progress, or remain just promises so far. Performance tweaking will mostly come later in the process, so start-up is slow, and you'll see no significant upgrade to the operating speed of the browser. Security features, at least in some cases, seem not to be implemented or only partially so, but the browser does work correctly with Microsoft's Antivirus API. And Firefox now passes the Web Standards Project's Acid2 Browser test¬which Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 still fails.

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The most exciting change, though, is the one that lets developers easily adapt their Web apps to run off-line in Firefox. That could allow prod¬ucts such as Google Docs to give Microsoft more of a run for its money. On a more immediate level, extension writers will be able to take advantage of a JavaScript library that will make extensions easier to create and more powerful.

Hold off using this beta as your everyday browser for now, especially because getting versions 2 and 3 to run smoothly on the same machine is not a simple task. But if Mozil1a's developers succeed in their goals, this will be a "robust platform to build Web applications on," as vice president of engineering Mike Schroep¬fer told me.

As with the current version of the browser, you'll assuredly be able to customize the new one to the hilt. Without Firefox's customization capability, both IE and Opera are better configured for usability. But once enough Web apps take advantage of the new browser's off-line capabilities, this browser should come into its own