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Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 Available For Testing

On Monday, the Mozilla team announced the general availability of Firefox 3.1 beta 2 for testing. Aside from increased localization support, a new Private Browsing mode, new tab switching and preview behaviors, and support for a number of new web technologies (such as the W3C Geolocation API and offline applications), the new beta release uses the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine by default, and has made tweaks to the Gecko engine to speed content rendering.

As always, this is a beta release, so the focus is on testing new features, identifying and squashing bugs (ranging from those that cause all out crashes to linguistic oddities that might arise in newly localized versions), and the browser's behavior on different platforms. Those needing more stability in a web browser should keep using the stable Firefox 3.0 release (Firefox 2.x will no longer be supported in the new year).

Of course, testing is a broad term. CNet tested Firefox's JavaScript benchmarks and found the new TraceMonkey engine was fairly comparable to Chrome's new V8 JavaScript engine. Because benchmarks rely on a number of factors, PC Magazine, running the same benchmarking test, gave Firefox's TraceMonkey the "faster" award, but says the speed difference between engines was quite minimal. It does seem, however, that Firefox 3.1 is shaping up to be a speedier browsing experience than its predecessor.

Firefox 3.1 beta 3 is tentatively scheduled for a February 2009 release. The final version will follow shortly after.

• firefox
• mozilla
• browser
• testing
• Chrome
• beta
• developer
• internet
• web browser
• TraceMonkey

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