"Operator leverages microformats and other semantic data that are already available on many web pages to provide new ways to interact with web services."

Firefox 3 developers are taking all the time that they need to accomplish their new Firefox. After the Beta 1 Mozilla has released Firefox 3 beta 2 to get more feedbacks about bugs from its testing community. Bugzilla was a little bit busy lately since the beta 1 thousands of bugs fortunately 900 of them are fixed. Firefox developers are trying to reveal more bugs to make their Firefox 3 better. The Beta 2 features are very promising and the Firefox 3 will definitely beat all competitors.

Last night I downloaded the latest beta release from Mozilla, Firefox 3 Beta 1, meaning to just have a look-see so that I could pen a few impressions. Since then, I haven't bothered to load up Firefox 2 because, even though it's a pre-production test version, Firebox 3 Beta 1 is a mighty fine browser.

Microformats support is one of the most relevant features coming to Firefox 3. It is not one of those instant gratification features like spell checking or tabbed browsing. It’s in the league of offline web applications support, web content handling and live bookmarks

Mozilla announced today the official release of Firefox 3 beta 4, which includes over 900 additional improvements related to the previous beta release. At this stage in development, most of the work on Firefox is heavily focused on polishing the user interface, refining performance, and reducing the memory overhead. These efforts clearly show in beta 4, which is highly robust and impressively responsive.

Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 was released today across all platforms, Windows, Macintosh and Linux, in 25 different languages. Although not quite complete, it does have some impressive new features, such as a new Google Desktop style URL search bar, reduced resource hogging, better handling of passwords and download file types, but more importantly for Linux users, better GTK support.

"Microformats are open data formats that some Yahoo! sites support. You can't see them (unless you do a "view source" on a web page), but they're there -- bits of HTML that describe things like contact information (hcard), a review (hreview), an event (hcalendar), or a listing (hlisting). Microformats make data in web pages reuseable since the data is in a standard, canonical, format instead of just a jumble of HTML. Thousands of sites expose their data in Microformats, and that data is available for developers to use. One of the best opportunities for developers to make use of Microformats is in the forthcoming Firefox 3 web browser which features a new global Microformats object and API. The new API makes finding and parsing Microformats trivial and efficient..."

"I think Operator is giving people a new way to interact with data on the Web," Kaply told InternetNews.com. "It's a variation on what some people call 'instant mashups.' The idea is that rather than having to rely on other people to integrate data on multiple Web sites via traditional mashups, tools like Operator can provide the end-user a way to instantly pass data between multiple Web sites."

"Firefox 3 Beta 4 is now available for download. This is the twelfth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3..." -- ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/3.0b4/linux-i686/