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Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 (soon to be Firefox 3.5)

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Quantum:
Beta 3 has finally been released. Slowed down by the huge effort gone in to it's new JavaScript Engine called Tracemonkey making sure it works well, reduced crashes and no performance regressions. There shall be at least a beta 4 before final release and it will be called Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, the version bump is to represent how much has gone in to this release.

You can download here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html


New features include:


* A much improved faster Javascript engine
* Improved tear away tabs (drag a tab off the window or in to the content and it'll make a new window)
* Improved the new Private Browsing Mode.
* Granular options for history clearing, choose last 1 hour, last day etc..
* Improvements to web worker thread support.
* Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
* Many standards improvement support from CSS2, CSS3, <video> and <audio> elements from HTML5 and the drag and drop API
* Downloadable font support from @font-face in CSS3
* SVG transformations, even on standard HTML elements










--- Quote from: old beta 2 ---Beta 2 continues from beta 1 and we now expect a beta 3.

New features include:


* A new Private Browsing Mode that allows you to browse without Firefox storing any traces of where you’ve been - perfect for online holiday shopping!
* New functions that make it easy to remove the history of your past few hours of browsing, or remove all traces of a website.
* New support for web worker threads. (faster processing of multiple files at once)
* The new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine is now on by default for web content. (much faster javascript!)
* Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
* Removed the new tab-switching & preview behavior based on feedback from Beta 1 users
* 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.
* Tear away tabs (drag tabs and they turn in to a new window)
Firefox seems to have settled to 93/100 on the Acid 3 test and it looks like it's going to stay there till Firefox 3.2. Tear away tabs at the moment are too sensitive and some old tab dragging behavior is lost, this is expected to be fixed for beta 3.

You can download here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

--- End quote ---







--- Quote from: old beta 1 ---Mozilla has decided to make an interim step before Firefox 4 (which is going to have some massive code changes), so has created a fast paced development cycle for a Firefox 3.1. There's going to be at least 2 betas, maybe 3, but looking at a much shorter testing time than Firefox 3 as projects have been smaller and more pragmatical to get a final version out hopefully for before Christmas.

New features include:


* A new tab-switching shortcut that shows previews of the tab you’re switching to (ctrl + Tab is the short cut)
* Tab bar on by default to allow more obvious tabbing features like being able to drag a tab from 1 window to another (expect to be able to tear away a tab to it's own window in beta 2)
* Added support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 properties
* Improved control over the Smart Location Bar using special characters to restrict your search (for example if you use * before searching you just search bookmarks)
* Support for HTML5 <audio> and <video> tag, with native OGG/Theora support an open source codec with the major example of wikimedia using it
* Support for the geolocation specification, expect more on this in beta 2 which will be able to calculate your position through local wi-fi spots
* Allowing multiple bookmarks to be tagged at the same time

You can dowload here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

Things to expect in beta 2:

Much faster JavaScript engine when JIT is enabled
about:sessionrestore to allow much finer control over session restore
Yet further improvement in the Acid 3 score (currently 89/100 in beta 1 with no visual errors, score 90/100 on the trunk, this could rise to 97/100 for Firefox 3.1).

--- End quote ---

chip!:
awesome.. thanks for the heads up.

ps, do you know if they are doing portable versions for these intern versions?

Quantum:

--- Quote from: chip! on October 14, 2008, 03:37:25 pm ---awesome.. thanks for the heads up.

ps, do you know if they are doing portable versions for these intern versions?

--- End quote ---

The portable version isn't created by Mozilla it's just done by that portable website. I imagine they'll re-do it given all you essentially have to do is add a 3 line JavaScript file in to the Firefox directory to make it portable (I used to do that before I heard someone made it portable), I don't remember what to write off the top of my head so I'll have a look around and see if I can make a guide, but I imagine the website will have it out soon.

P.S made an error above the shortcut to preview tabs is ctrl + tab not ctrl + t, updated it now

Quantum:
Updated for beta 2.

Quantum:
Updated to Beta 3.

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