Are You Ready for Firefox 3.1?

by Mike Gunderloy - Jul. 18, 2008Comments (5)

It may seem as if the Firefox 3 release cycle went on forever, especially if you hopped on board with the earliest betas. Many of us are still catching our breath after the version 3 release, waiting for add-ons to be updated and tweaking our preferences. But don't rest too long: Firefox 3.1 is right around the corner.

According to the minutes of the most recent planning meeting, the first alpha of Firefox 3.1 is due in July - probably early next week - and the final version is targeted for the end of this year or the start of 2009. Judging by the various information available on the various developer sites, it seems fair to characterize this release as evolutionary rather than revolutionary - the developers are picking up some long-postponed work items and doing some fine tuning, but it won't have the sort of complete UI and rendering overhaul that characterized version 3.

Among the things that are scheduled to be in Firefox 3.1 are a few lingering fixes for compatibility with the "Acid 3" CSS test, tag management improvements for bookmarks, and a private browsing model that makes sure no potentially-identifiable information is saved from your session. Other improvements may include better video support, SVG changes, and some more eye candy for working with multiple tabs.

If you're really interested, you don't even have to wait for the alpha build to find out what's happening. Just download and install the latest nightly build and install it for yourself. Just remember to put it in a separate folder so you can go back to 3.0 when you're done poking around. As I write this, the pre-alpha build doesn't like many of my add-ons, but the Ctrl+Tab tab switcher, complete with thumbnails, is very nice.


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5 Comments
 

Hopefully this sh!t actually works - I've had WAY TOO MANY problems on 3.0 and just got rid of it very quickly... Quite a let down after all that hype...

0 Votes

Are they going to try and set a record for "Most Downloaded Update" this time around???

I love Firefox, but I have to agree with the "Crazy Korean" on this one...

0 Votes

I don't understand why everyone is making a big deal about Firefox crashing, slowing, etc. etc. I don't know enough about this stuff but all I can say is that I downloaded version 3 and it is frickin awesome! MUCH FASTER than the older version and much more USEFUL.

And the Private Browsing I can definitely use ;)

0 Votes

Probably because of their multiple extensions that are not fully compatible: Firefox without extensions - 20megas, with my extensions almost 70megas.

0 Votes

Third-party have release Firefox 3.1 with 96/100 on Acid3 test. Can be download here: http://www.wg9s.com/mozilla/firefox/

0 Votes
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