OpenOffice.org said Wednesday that it had made the beta version of OpenOffice 3.0 available for download. The organization recommended that beta users not use the software for production, however; you have been warned.

What’s new? “The most immediately visible change to OpenOffice.org 3.0 is the new ‘Start Centre’, new fresh-looking icons, and a new zoom control in the status bar,” according to OpenOffice.org. “A closer look shows that 3.0 has a myriad of new features. Notable Calc improvements include a new solver component; support for spreadsheet collaboration through workbook sharing; and an increase to 1024 columns per sheet. Writer has an improved notes feature and displays of multiple pages while editing. There are numerous Chart enhancements, and an improved crop feature in Draw and Impress.”

A nice list of features, together with screenshots, is here.

“Behind the scenes, OpenOffice.org 3.0 will support the upcoming OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard, and is capable of opening files created with MS-Office 2007 or MS-Office 2008 for Mac OS X (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.),” the group added. “This is in addition to read and write support for the MS-Office binary file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.). “

Mozilla warned Wednesday that a malicious program inserted adware code into a Firefox plugin that has been downloaded thousands of times over the past three months.

Because of a virus infection, the Vietnamese language pack for Firefox 2 was polluted with adware, Mozilla security chief Window Snyder said in a blog posting. “Everyone who downloaded the most recent Vietnamese language pack since February 18, 2008 got an infected copy,” she wrote. “Mozilla does virus scans at upload time but the virus scanner did not catch this issue until several months after the upload.”

Mozilla is now going to add additional scans of its software to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future, she said.