Although Mozilla's Monday release of Firefox 3 Beta project, a developer preview release of its popular open source Web browser, has been a global effort, a significant portion of its core development takes place in Toronto.

The Mozilla Corporation today released Firefox 3 Beta 1, which is now available for download in a variety of languages. The beta includes updates to the default theme, the new places site management features, improved security architecture, and Gecko 1.9. Release notes with a more complete list of features, are also available.

Mozilla is nearing a release of the first beta of Firefox 3.0, which is several months behind schedule, making a final version of the open-source browser this year unlikely.

Mozilla and Google are collaborating on an effort to make web applications work offline. Firefox 3 will be the first internet browser to offer offline web application support when it launches at the end of this year.

The Mozilla Corporation has released Thunderbird 2.0.0.

French researcher Xiti claims that Mozilla Firefox keeps winning terrain in Europe. 24.1% of Internet users in Europe use Firefox. Slovenia (44.5%), Finland (41.3%), Croatia (36.5%), and Germany (36.2%) lead the way, followed by a group of mostly Eastern European countries. Remarkably, The Netherlands is only at 13.3%, right before Andorra. Oceania maintains a slight lead over Europe, at 24.8%; the rest of the world trails at 11.9% to 15.1%.

Following the Gecko security update releases a few days ago, the SeaMonkey project has issued new security and stability releases today for its all-in-one internet application suite. SeaMonkey 1.1.1 is now available for download, fixing several security vulnerabilities, along with a few issues reported on SeaMonkey 1.1.

If the Firefox browser were a car, it would be in the garage right now being souped up by an anxious group of gearheads.

When Firefox 3.0 is released later this year, the open-source browser is likely to contain a host of new features, including offline support for Web applications and new bookmark and search features. Mozilla released the second alpha version of Firefox 3.0 earlier this month.