WebProNews

The brave Firefox user has a new toy to play with ahead of Christmas morning, as Mozilla released the latest beta version of the next Firefox browser to the Internet.

Infrastructure and stability were the targets for Mozilla developers with their latest work. Memory usage, a longtime issue in Firefox, received considerable attention in the Firefox 3 Beta 2 release.

In the release notes, Mozilla had this to say about their efforts in improving the hot topic of memory usage in the browser:

Over 300 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 2 includes over 30 more memory leak fixes, and 11 improvements to our memory footprint.

Plenty of other improvements and updates to security, ease of use, and the personal browsing experience arrived with Beta 2. Web developers received consideration too, as Mozilla improved platform features like graphics, font handling, and offline support for web applications that have such functionality enabled.

Mozilla emphasized this build of Firefox 3 Beta 2 is suited for testing purposes at this time. "We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 3 Beta 2 milestone release," they said.