Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 review

Suddenly the web browsers are coming like cats and dogs.And each one coming with a new feature with every new release.After oepra releasing it’s new version, Firefox came out with its latest beta release.This new version is still at beta stage but its a stable release ,so you can download and take a peak into things to come.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1  layout engine originally developed by Netscape Communications Corporation but  currently in developement by Mozilla.

Gecko actually is an API which enables web applications to handle Internet-enabled applications, such as web browsers, content presentation, and client/server.Gecko is the second most-popular layout engine after Trident (used by Internet Explorer ), and followed by WebKit (used by Safari & Google Chrome) and Presto (used by Opera).

Three main features for users :

• Private browsing mode
• Awesomebar privacy options and view options
• windows XP + Vista updates

Main features for web developers:

• Geolocation
• Worker Threads
• CSS-SVG / External resource loading
• Native JSON
• Performance improvements for JS and DOM via TraceMonkey

Two of the most noted addition is going to be Private browsing mode and TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.Privacy tools eliminate what the browser records over the Internet such as URLs are not recorded, cookies are not saved and all other evidences are wiped from the cache and temp at the end of the session. Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer 8,Google’s Chrome and Apple Inc.’s Safari all have private browsing built in.

Apart from above features there is also support for the “video” and “audio” HTML tags and the new geolocation API which uses third-party application to pinpoint the user’s location and directs that information to Web sites and services.

Firefox 3.1 beta 1 also includes TraceMonkey JavaScript engine but  it’s still switched off by default. TraceMonkey  boosts rendering speeds up to 40 times over those of Firefox 3.0.

you can switch it on by typing “about:config” in the address bar  then type “javascript.options.jit.content” in the filter  box and double click it to enable theTraceMonkey JavaScript engine

Now here is the download link.go and take a look.

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4. Download Firefox 3.1 Beta 2
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