Firefox 3 Beta 1 is out and there are a few nice new features. I took a few minutes and played around with it and here are my findings.

The Install DMG still doesn’t include an alias to the Mac Applications folder. Come on Mozilla, get this one working please.

Once installed, the new Mac theme doesn’t take effect. You actually have to go download it. But once installed, it looks very nice. (Not sure about the Windows one.)

Bookmarks are integrated better. Simply star a page and it’s added, click the star again to rename it, add tags, put it in a folder or delete it.

More robust bookmarks management that includes import, export and revert options.

New places feature shows up. This is like smart folders or saved searches.

Click on a Favicon in the address bar and you’ll get site information that is usually unknown from a few of my tests. I tested apple.com, techcrunch.com and nytimes.com and all ended up unknown.

There is a new applications area in the preferences to help control how other applications interact with Firefox 3.

As promised, full Aqua widgets for Mac users. And they do look really nice.

When Firefox asks you to save a username and password, a nice browser bar shows up and doesn’t prompt you with a pop-up window

New icon to represent Plugins.

Updated download window with search box and info icons.

Firefox 3 beta 1 is also slightly lighter than Firefox 2.0.x on the Mac. The application is 45Mb as compared to 47.8. Hopefully Mozilla can continue to make it smaller; much smaller.

I’m sure there are other features that I’ve yet to come across. However, Firefox 3 is on it’s way and it’s looking like a nice upgrade.

Have you taken Firefox 3 for a spin? What have you found?