Mozilla’s Latest Firefox 3.1 Beta 3

Great news to all Firefox users! Mozilla has just announced the released of their latest browser – Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 which is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform and has actually been under development for the past 9 months. Mozilla reported in their Release Notes that Firefox 3.1 is an incremental release on the previous version with significant changes to improve web compatibility, performance, and ease of use.

Some of the noticeable changes/improvements are:

• This beta is now available in 64 languages
• Improved the new Private Browsing Mode.
• Improvements to web worker thread support.
• Improved performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• New native JSON support.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as the and elements, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, CSS 2.1 and 3 properties, SVG transforms and offline applications.

As of all beta versions, the new Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 is “considered” to be stable until more feedbacks and evaluation comments are gathered from developers and testing community. Words of caution though, do not expect all of their add-ons to work properly with this beta.

Here is a list of reported bugs so far.

• Dragging a tab onto the desktop doesn’t create a new window
• Occasionally Google Mail will fail to respond when creating a new filter, showing advanced search options, or clearing the spam folder. Reloading Google Mail fixes the issue
• When returning from Private Browsing Mode, some sites served over SSL will not load properly
• Some users with older computers or slower Internet connections may experience choppy OGG video/audio playback
• Users who run this beta, then downgrade to a previous Firefox 3.1 Alpha or Beta, will be unable to use stored passwords
• If you are using MS Natural Input 2002 v8.1, IME will automatically activate when certain text fields are focused.

Update: Firefox 3.5 Beta 4

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 14th, 2009 at 12:15 am and is filed under Web Browsers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.