The good folks at Mozilla keep plugging away at Firefox 3. Now Firefox 3 Beta 5 is ready for download.

The two big ticket items for Firefox 3 Beta 5 are improved OS integration (Windows, OS X, and Linux) and increased Javascript performance. If you are one of those people that felt Firefox 2 just wasn't "OS X-y enough", you're in luck.

On the Javascript performance front, the release notes specifically state that "web applications like Google Mail ... run twice as fast in Firefox 3 Beta 5." Funny enough, Gmail is still horribly broken (per bug 415252). Since I'm a full-time Gmail user, I can tell you that although "twice as fast" may be a bit of an exaggeration from a user's point of view, there is definitely a performance improvement over previous versions of Firefox 3.