Four months after the original scheduled date, Mozilla has released beta 1 of Firefox 3, and it appears that Mozilla spent those extra months stuffing features into the browser. The release notes for the beta constitute a large list of enhancements in areas like security, ease of use, customization and personalization, and performance.
Notable features include: a blacklist-based malware protection system; one-click access to site ownership information; a new full-page zoom feature that scales text, layout and images together; and speed and memory usage enhancements.
The two million new or changed lines of code in the browser also yield some improvements for web developers as well, including improved font and image handling, and support for embedded color profiles. New features for developers are documented here.
