Someone discovered the link for Firefox 3 beta 1 release candidate at Mozilla public FTP and dugg the news as official release of the Firefox 3 beta. The folks at Mozilla acted quickly and removed the link, now it redirects to Mozilla dev news.

I didn’t get the chance to download this release but Download Squad has posted some features of the Firefox 3 Beta.

there are a few nice new features in Firefox 3 beta. For example, you’ll notice a star icon sitting in your URL bar. It works sort of like the star in Google Reader or Gmail.

You can instantly view all of your most recently visited sites, recently starred sites, or pages that you visit most often.

A few other changes include an enhanced plugin manager, security requirements for upgrading add-ons, and an enhanced security system that alerts you of suspected attacks. Visit this page in Firefox 3 to see an example.

The official Firefox Beta test day is Friday if you want to checkout