Mozilla on Thursday released the third beta version of Firefox 3.1, aka Shiretoko, one of the frontrunners in the current race to improve web browsers.
According to the Firefox 3.1b3 release notes, the new version includes better 'web worker' multitasking abilities, a faster Gecko rendering engine for showing web pages, and upgrades to the TraceMonkey engine for faster, more stable execution of websites' JavaScript programs.
Firefox is vying with Apple's Safari 4 beta and Google's Chrome for the best JavaScript performance, a factor that is important for the new generation of sophisticated websites such as Google Docs and or Facebook applications. So far, Internet Explorer has the dominant market share, with Firefox in second place.
Mozilla earlier expected the third beta version to be the final beta, but those plans changed. Because of the magnitude of the changes in the 3.1 betas, the next full release will be numbered 3.5. A fourth beta, 3.5b4, is planned, too, followed by the release-candidate cycle, before the final version 3.5 is released, Mozilla said.
"The increase in version number is proposed due to the sheer volume of work which makes Shiretoko feel like much more than a small, incremental improvement over Firefox 3: TraceMonkey, video-tag and player support, improvements to user controls over data privacy, significant improvements in the web layout and rendering platform, and much more," said Mozilla's Mike Beltzner in a blog post on 5 March.
Improvements in the new beta include:
- Improvements to 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 video and audio elements, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, CSS 2.1 and 3 properties, SVG transforms and offline applications
Web workers let a browser perform computing tasks in the background, which allows for more sophisticated programs. JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, lets a browser and a server share information, and Mozilla says that building it natively into the browser improves speed and security. Private browsing is also built into Chrome and Safari. Built-in-video and audio support means no Flash player or other technology is required, but it only works today with the relatively rare Ogg file formats.
As it is a beta, and there are problems such as an issue where Gmail hangs, users are advised to be careful about installing it.
