Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 came out today. Being a browserista (aka a browser-fanatic), I downloaded and played with it.

It has some interesting new things like a Mac OS X theme that you can download. Here’s a snapshot of Firefox 3 with the default theme on Leopard:

And here’s a snapshot of Firefox 3 with the Proto theme on Leopard, which tries to make it more Mac-like:

Here’s what’s new for the Mac crowd in Firefox 3:

• Native look and feel in HTML forms – which means that you’ll see Aqua buttons
• Growl support for completed downloads
• Integration with the OS X spellchecker
• Better dialog for allowing access to third party apps to handle custom URL schemes
  

Well it is a step in the right direction, but I think there’s still quite a ways to looking and feeling like a Mac app. Here’s a few suggestions:

• Much better AppleScript support
• Make the default Downloads folder be the ~/Downloads folder like in Leoaprd instead of ~/Desktop
• Follow the Mac way of Window Zooming and grow big enough for the web page, not just try to take up the whole screen like is common on Windows
• Support the Safari .webarchive format

Its early yet, but it looks like the next round of the Mac browser wars is going to be interesting.