Firefox 3.1 beta 3 finally sees release

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 13 Mar 2009 at 10:42

Mozilla has released the third beta of Firefox 3.1.

The majority of work in the new release has gone into the troubled TraceMonkey Javascript rendering engine, which should bring significant performance and stability improvements, according to the company.

Private Browsing Mode has also been tweaked, and there's now broader support for new web technologies such as Ogg file formats, which allow videos to run within the browser without needing to install codecs.

Beta three also brings support for the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, CSS 2.1 and 3 properties, SVG transforms and offline applications.

Firefox 3.1 beta three arrives just a week before the expected release of Internet Explorer 8, and follows the release of Safari 4 beta. All the browsers are making big claims about their performance improvements in the wake of Chrome's release.

Beta four will also be the last release of Firefox to bear the 3.1 version number, beta four will be dubbed 3.5 to reflect the time spent on the browser.

You can download the beta from the Mozilla downloads page. As with other beta releases, extensions may not be supported.