[RobRich]

I mostly use Opera, but I have been testing Minefield (Mozilla 1.9 trunk development build) since the alpha development stage back in 2006 with largely positive results. I use nightly trunk builds instead of the Firefox 3 "public beta" releases (Mozilla 1.9 branch), and even so, Minefield has proven quite reliable with only minimal development fuss.

Load up the Nightly Tester Tools, tweak the networking config (even if just FasterFox), and enjoy a quick browser. For example, recent nightly builds of Minefield are offering impressive JavaScript performance, oftentimes on par and sometimes even exceeding Opera.

Firefox 3 should go final in late June.

The next-generation Mozilla 2.x "mozilla-central" trunk should go live sometime this year, which will eventually provide the basis for Firefox 4. Source is already online for trunk development, but the Mercurial system (Mozilla is migrating from CVS) is currently being tested with Mozilla 1.9 trunk code in preperation for the upcoming project. It could take a few weeks/months to get Mozilla 2.x trunk into the pipeline.