Alex Faaborg of Mozilla has some nice mock-ups and overviews of upcoming features in Firefox 3 (due later this year).

A couple weeks ago I wrote of my displeasure with Firefox 2 – particularly on the Mac – because it seems to have become too bloated. It would seem Mozilla is aware that some people feel this way and have said they will design version 3 to better work within OS X and this bit from their wiki is particularly encouraging to me:

We aim to do this in part by:

Delivering the right set of features – not too many or too few. (The goal is to create a useful browser, not a minimal browser.)

I think finding just the right point between minimalism and usefulness is key.

The other features I’m particularly excited about include:

• Web Page Tagging. Bookmarks are old school, tagging could be a much more useful way to organize things.
• Content Handling. It will be great when you can set default actions for various files whether they are downloadable or of the microformat variety.
• Microformat Detection. This will make moving through different sites doing different things on the Internet much more seamless.
• Changes to the Location Bar. Whoa, this is a pretty bold move if they do it:
  

  We are considering removing the favicon from the location bar, and changing the location bar so that everything except “Public Suffix + 2″ is greyed out.

  I love the idea of highlighting the actual site you are on within the bar, as long as you can still easily copy the entire URL.

• Private Browsing. Safari currently has this and it works well for visiting sites that you don’t want saving things locally.

You can download the latest Alpha version (4) of Firefox 3 (Gran Paradiso) here.