Mozilla launches Firefox 3.1 beta 2

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 9 Dec 2008 at 10:13

Mozilla has released Firefox 3.1 beta 2, which it claims is up to three times faster than prior releases.

The new release is the first beta to have the TraceMonkey rendering engine enabled by default, which Mozilla claims can dramatically speed up programs written in JavaScript.

Early indications are that the rendering engine lives up to its promise, with a noticeable improvement evident in Google Docs, though whether it's three times faster than previous versions remains to be tested.

The other notable feature in beta 2 is the private browsing mode that allows users to surf the web without leaving any traces of their session on the computer.

The company was initially reluctant to include private browsing, putting it on hold for four years due to the engineering time required to implement it.

However, its appearance in Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 forced Mozilla's hand, and the company added a month to the beta's development to include the feature.

Early tests of the mode suggest it works much as advertised. Entering private browsing brings a message asking whether you want to restore your tabs when completed. It then shuts down current tabs to begin the session. Unlike Chrome's sleuth icon and IE8's notification in the address bar, though, Firefox only leaves a discrete mention of the private browsing mode in the title bar.

"After all, if you're doing something online that you don't want your co-workers to know about, you don't want to raise their attention with a big sign saying private as they pass by and glance over your shoulder," says lead developer Ehsan Akhgari.

There are a few niggles, however. A number of our adds on were broken, and the beta sacrifices the new tab switching behaviour found in earlier releases. This feature showed thumbnail previews of pages, and altered the alt tab shortcut to flip through tabs on most recent usage, rather than their order in the tab bar. The developers claim the features need more work and have yanked them for the forseeable future.

The new version is available for download from Mozilla's website.