Maven 3 intends to improve usability, increase performance, and allow safe embedding. Ensuring backwards compatibility has also been important in this new version; known incompatibilities are listed here. Users may not see many differences in this major release, but substantial changes have been made behind the scenes. Here are some of the visible changes, including new features:

• A new parallel build functionality enables you to schedule and build modules in parallel.
• POM validation has improved, along with warning and error messages.
• Builds should be more consistent due to changes in classloading, dependency ordering, and multiproject building.
• The reporting aspects have been changed, along with the processing of reports.

For more information about this release, check here.