TAG | Firefox 3.1 beta lands on Planet Earth, not ready for most Earthlings |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Thursday, 16 October 2008 | |
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Now the first beta of 3.1 has landed and as you’d expect, it’s a “milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3.1” according to the Mozilla Blog. Looking visually identical to 3.0, one of the big new features is an answer to the V8 Javascript engine Google developed for its Chrome browser, called the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. Once you download the new beta, the “Welcome to Firefox 3.1 beta” splash screen loads, promising that “Firefox 3.1 is coming...” and showing the new features and benefits for “everyone, web developers and extension developers”. In the web developers section, developers are invited to “Test your site with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine to see how much faster it runs”. TraceMonkey “adds native code compilation to Mozilla’s JavaScript engine (known as SpiderMonkey)” and the “net result is a massive speed increase both in the browser chrome and web page content.” Some of the other new features which Mozilla wants feedback on include: - Web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine - Added support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 properties - A new tab-switching shortcut that shows previews of the tab you’re switching to – press “Ctrl-Tab” to jump back and forth - Improved control over the Smart Location Bar using special characters to restrict your search - Support for new web technologies such as the <video> and <audio> elements, (letting you watch Ogg video without the need for any plugins, with other file formats to follow) - The ability to drag and drop tabs from one Firefox window to another (as is possible with Google’s Chrome browser) - The W3C Geolocation API (letting your browser become location aware, thus being able to be more helpful when searching for information) - JavaScript query selectors, web worker threads, SVG transforms and offline applications. What’s this “improved control over the Smart Location Bar” all about, and what other new features are there for web and extension developers? Please read on to page 2. |
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