• [Improved in Beta 3!] Speed: Major architectural changes (such as the move to Cairo and a rewrite to how reflowing a page layout works) put foundations in place for major performance tuning which have resulted in speed increases that continue to increase page drawing speed in Beta 3. This release also features over 90 changes that improve performance over the previous beta.

• [Improved in Beta 3!] Download & Install Add-ons: the Add-ons Manager (Tools > Add-ons) can now be used to download and install a Firefox customization from the thousands of Add-ons available from our community add-ons website. When you first open the Add-ons Manager, a list of recommended Add-ons is shown.

• [Improved in Beta 3!] Memory usage: Over 350 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates 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.

Check out the full Firefox 3 Beta 3 Release Notes to read more about what is better, what has changed and what may stay the same. As an interesting side note – I think it is about time Mozilla started to remind addon developers to update their work to get it ready for Firefox 3.

Here are the results of our latest poll:

As you can see it is almost a 50/50 split. I’d really like to see the number (if Mozilla has it) of how many extensions are “Firefox 3 ready” at the current date and time as well.