The first real, official, and honest to-goodness beta release of Firefox 3 is out. You know, not like that little false alarm pre-beta version we told you about a few weeks ago.

Still, the main differences between this beta and that pre-release copy are that the Firefox team has spent a few more weeks hammering out bugs. The feature set is pretty much what we knew it would be.

• Updates to the Gecko rendering engine which should improve stability.
• New Places feature makes it easier to find the sites you've visited most recently, most often, or starred for coming back to later.
• New security features alert you when you're visiting insecure web sites and let you auto-scan downloads with your antivirus software

We're still not quite ready to replace Firefox 2 with an admittedly still buggy beta. But it's pretty exciting to see where Mozilla is going with its flagship web browser.