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Meet Firefox 3.0b1.  The fine folks at Mozilla have put some effort into this beta release and the changes, while some are hard to find, seem quite handy.  Firefox 1 and 2 have been great successes and now we can see what we can expect from the 3rd installment.

Word from Mozilla is an official beta is coming next week.  You can FTP the current beta, but Mozilla isn’t don’t playing with it just yet.

Here is the rundown of new or updated features:

Bookmarks

• Taking a cue from Gmail, you can “star” pages like you do an email in Gmail to make it stand out.  These stars are like bookmarks but allow for some interesting interplay in the next feature.
• It also appears you can tag bookmarks to group them easier.
• Places:  As new tab in your bookmarks is called Places.  From Places you can see items you’ve starred recently, most visited starred places, tagged items.  What is cool, from these smaller lists you can open all in tabs.  Handy.

Pretty Stuff

• Aqua buttons: Mac’ing it up a bit, the new Firefox will allow eye-candy buttons allowing those with Mac envy some relief
• Interface is said to be new, but looks familiar enough
• Looks like Mozilla has spent time making skins that match native OS.  Whatever.

Gears

• Improved add-on menus
• enhanced security
• new notifications

Read[MacSlice]