On Monday November 19, 2007, Mozilla released Firefox version 3.0 beta 1. The initial schedule was to release version 3 to beta in July. 

The beta release includes several interesting features

• ability to use web applications to handle protocol handlers ie: using google mail to handle mailto: tags.
• the addition of one click bookmarking .
• direct typing in the address bar searches your history and favorites as well and displays those as choices.
• new download manager with the ability to resume previous downloads will be a real time saver.

More information about the release and access to the download can be found here.

I've been using the new beta for a few hours now and not ran into any issues as such it seems to be a good alternative to Internet Explorer.  Although some of my previous add-ons were disabled when running this version of Firefox.