Here’s a really nice down-to-earth screencast of the new features in Firefox 3, which will be released this month. I found this through Slashdot, but it is actually quite straightforward and you shouldn’t need a technical background to understand what’s going on here.

The screencast shows a nice overview of the new Firefox, but I wanted to focus on two very important security features that are new in Firefox 3: Website Identity and Malware protection. The website identity feature uses certificates and previous visits to inform the user who runs the website and whether or not the user has been there before. This is critical information that can both improve user confidence and prevent phising attacks.

The malware protection feature attempts to prevent sites from taking advantage of flaws in the browser or add-ons. This feature is similar to the Phising protection added in Firefox 2, but they are also integrating virus scanning and malware protection into the download manager.

The screencast doesn’t talk about Mac features, but since I use a Mac, I will mention the big ones briefly. Firefox 3 takes on more of the Mac user interface conventions when installed on a Mac. One of their big pushes was to make sure that their browser was a native application for each operating system it installed on, so this actually applies to Windows as well. Also, Firefox 3 has significantly improved memory management and speed on the Mac. This was improved across all operating systems, but it was a serious complaint in the Mac community because Safari was so much more efficient than IE or Firefox. For the interested, Daring Fireball has a much more detailed coverage of Firefox 3 for the Mac.

Obviously, I can’t cover all the features in a new release of something like Firefox with a single blog post, so if you want more information I recommend checking out lifehacker’s top ten list of new Firefox features. For those who are of a more technical persuasion and wanting more information, you can check out the Firefox 3 Product Requirements document here. Also for the serious geek, check out this post (somewhat old now) on Firefox 3 Memory Usage improvements.

[Edit: There's an excellent "Field Guide to Firefox 3" post here that explains all anyone would want to know and more about the new version of Firefox, which is released tomorrow, June 17th.]