Web Talk

After almost 3 month’s waiting, Mozilla has released the new Firefox 3.1 beta 3.  Firefox 3.1 is based on the famous  Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform which has been under developlemt for 9 months at the time I am writing.  Let’s see together what improvements and enhancements the Mozilla team has brought in this new version, while it is already frantically at work to release the new beta 4 planned for  April 14.

First of all, according to Mozilla’s Bugzilla problem-tracking database, the TraceMonkey flaw that held up Beta 3 has not yet been fixed. Because of this and other reason, on the main page we can see the following information:

• This is pre-release software: you may encounter compatibility problems with some websites and add-ons.
• If you find a problem please let us know or file a bug.
• For more details, read the release notes and known issues.

Here is a list of the most important fixes and changes available:

• Firefox 3.1. beta 3 is available in 64 languages (!).
• The Private Browsing Mode has beengreatly improved.
• Improvements to web worker thread support.
• Support for new web technologies such as the <video> and <audio> elements, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, CSS 2.1 and 3 properties, SVG transforms and offline applications.

If you want to know more and stay up-to-date with all the improvments (and bugs) in Firefox 3.1 beta 3, have a look at this page. If you want to download this new release, visit this page.