Mozilla Corporation today released Firefox 3.0 Beta 1, which is now available for download in a variety of languages. The beta includes updates to the default theme, the new places site management features, improved security architecture, and Gecko 1.9.

Main highlights of Firefox 3 beta include:

Malware Protection: helps identify websites which install viruses, spyware or trojans
Anti-virus integration: Firefox will inform anti-virus software when downloading executables
Full page zoom: from the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images.
Smart Places Folder: quickly access your recently bookmarked and tagged pages, as well as you more frequently visited pages with the new smart places folder on your bookmark toolbar.
Tags: Associate keywords with your bookmarks to sort them by topic
Download Manager: The user interface has been completely redesigned and now includes a search text box for filtering completed downloads. Users can also resume downloads after restaring the web browser.
Text selection improvements: Multiple text selections can be made with Ctrl/Cmd; Double-click drag selects in “word-by-word” mode; Triple-clicking selects a paragraph.
Memory usage: Over 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged
Location bar & auto-complete: Type the title or tag of a page in the location bar to quickly find the site you were looking for in your history; favicons, bookmark, and tag indicators help you see where results are coming from.
Offline support: Enables web applications to provide offline functionality

All in all, over 11,000 bug reports have been closed and classified as fixed.

Download Firefox for Windows Vista, Mac and Linux here