Second alpha of Firefox 3.1 released

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 8 Sep 2008 at 08:49

Mozilla has launched the second alpha of Firefox 3.1 as it attempts to head off fresh competition from Google's Chrome.

The second alpha includes several new features, including the ability to drag and drop tabs between different browser windows and support for the HTML 5 video tag, which will allow developers to embed videos directly into web pages without using proprietary formats such as Flash.

However, it doesn't include the new TraceMonkey Javascript interpreter, which Mozilla boldly claims will make Firefox 3.1 three times faster than its recently released predecessor.

Mozilla is continuing to test TraceMonkey in the nightly builds given to its developers before including the feature in beta builds, which are expected later this year.

Last week, Mozilla announced it was pushing back the launch of 3.1's first beta by three weeks, although it still expects the software to launch around the turn of the year.

However, Alpha 2 does include new "web workers" that improve the browser's handling of Javascript - something that Google has been trumpeting as a major advantage of Chrome.

"Thankfully preliminary support for web workers has landed in Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2 so that expensive computations can be moved off to a background thread," Mozilla's developer notes claim. "The user interface will remain responsive while the JS engine churns and navigating away from the web page will even pause its execution."

Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2 can be downloaded here.