We've seen a bit of peripheral activity going on around Firefox, including the Firefox Extend contest that just concluded today, with Shareaholic, Minimap and SamePlace taking the grand prizes for the browser add-ons they developed. Today, Firefox has released the Firefox 3 browser, which is now available for testing. Firefox does recommend that only developers and those willing to test the Beta 3 release download it, but you can get it here. Stan and I both had quite a time testing Firefox Beta 3 over the past few months (I've since reverted back to Firefox 2), but from a conceptual level, Firefox is looking to make things interesting (and better, of course).
Some of the new features you'll find with this release are better security including improved presentation of identity and security for websites you visit, and a simpler add-on installation process. The discovery of add-ons has also been simplified, so users can find all the fun extras for the browser. Pushing these add-ons even further seems to be an important aspect of Firefox's overall initiatives, which I think is an important thing to pay attention to as applications on the web get more open and surfers are being presented with more options for social browsing, such as Flock.