With already a fourth beta out, Firefox is finally on track for a mature release later this year. Although still in beta, Firefox 3 does sport some new features that are greatly appreciated.

The most noticeable change is the continued tweaking of the default skin. For the first time there is now a distinct difference between Windows XP and Windows Vista. All skins, except Linux, feature the key lock concept of a very large back button and a smaller forward button. The key lock concept by itself should make Firefox more distinguishable from other browser. Although a great concept it feel poorly executed, as personally I find it uglier than Firefox 2. Let's hope some improvements will come before the final (just look at the ugly beveled border...).

The awesome bar (the new location bar), has got some additional intelligence, as when you constantly type the same keywords for a URL it will remember the association. I think that the idea behind the awesome bar is nice, including the highlighting, but it takes a lot of space and sometimes feels slow.

Not to be too negative, Firefox 3 does show a great deal of improvements in the areas of general performance (rendering seems much smoother) and memory usage. Due to the new fragmenting algorithm and the garbage collector it's much nicer on resources, even beating Opera 9.50 snapshots in unofficial benchmarks.

Firefox 3 Beta 5 is scheduled for a code freeze this month, as this not-so-really-planned beta will be the last before we get a round of release candidates on the road for a final release.