Firefox 3.1 beta lands on Planet Earth, not ready for most Earthlings

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 16 October 2008 16:37

Opinion and Analysis

The improvements to the Smart Location Bar give you some “new ways to change what shows up in the Smart Location Bar, such as restricting results to show only your history (and not your unvisited bookmarks) or matching only in the URL instead of also in the title. Additionally, you can see your Smart Keywords queries show up in the drop down.”

For example, you can “restrict the search to your history by typing “^”, or bookmarks with “*”, or tagged pages with “+”. To make what you’ve typed match only in the URL type “@”, and for title/tags only use “#”.”

Web developers can learn more about the new audio and video elements, find out about specific features available for building websites as well as take advantage of “new DOM features like query selectors.

XUL and application developers (extension developers) have the following new features available, as well as the opportunity of testing their extensions to make them work with 3.1 when it launches.

- The XUL textbox widget now offers a search type, for use as search fields

- Drag and drop of tabs between windows which adds swapDocShells method to the browser widget

- The panel.level attribute of panel element is used to specify whether panels appear on top of other applications or just the window the panel is contained within

- Cross-site XMLHttpRequest is now supported

- Progress events for XMLHttpRequest

- Native JSON support

Testers can download Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 builds for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in 36 different languages, although in English, only US English is available, UK English is yet to come.

So, should you download this browser if you’re tempted to? Only if you’re a developer, have no need for any plug-ins as yet, or simply like living on the bleeding edge of the browser.

Already Firefox 3.1 beta 1 has crashed on me once since downloading it earlier this evening, as I was opening up a new tab. An error report popped up asking me if I wanted to send a crash report to Mozilla.

This I did, and Firefox 3.1 beta 1 loaded up again, reloading my open tabs, showing that it’s not ready for the public but testers only as Mozilla stresses on its blog (which leads to the download page).

I personally didn’t start using Firefox 3.0 until beta 3 launched, (having used 2.x before that), and have been using Firefox 3 happily since then, going through all the betas and release candidates until it went gold a few months ago, although my primary browser is Google Chrome.

I still have IE 8 Beta 2, Opera 9.6, Safari 3 and now Firefox 3.1 beta 1 available to me, all of which I use from time to time for various functions as they’re all very good, contributing to the most browser competition we’ve had in years, with each giving us their own window to the world wide web.