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Digital Arts Online has a thorough break down of some of the snags the Firefox development team has encountered as it continues work on the browser's 3.1 release. TraceMonkey, the JavaScript engine that's responsible for the browser's performance boost, seems to be what's holding its actual release back.

According to the forum posts the article points to, both Firefox developers and those focusing specifically on TraceMonkey agree that a decision has to be made -- but whether it's better to release Firefox 3.1 without TraceMonkey, release Firefox with TraceMonkey disabled by default, or give the developers a set amount of time before making the decision at all -- might be a sticking point.

When Google's Marissa Mayer told TechCrunch's Michael Arrington that Chrome would drop the beta designation less than two days ago, the implication was that it would happen pretty quickly. When you consider the length of some beta stages (and drawn out, fanfare driven gold releases), Chrome's 1.0 release yesterday was fast and relatively quiet.

InformationWeek shares a little of my aforementioned concern that taking an application out of the testing stage prematurely can have some serious consequences, and it does offer some insight into Google's thought processes.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is reporting that Google's vice president Marissa Mayer told him in an interview that Chrome will be coming out of beta.

Mayer didn't give a definite time frame, but one would assume that this would mean sooner rather than later. This announcement is a little surprising for a few reasons.

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.

In October, Mozilla witnessed a surge in Firefox 3's market share as it continued its plan to decommission Firefox 2 -- and the Gecko engine that powered it -- before the end of December.

For two weeks in October, Firefox 3 claimed 20% market share, something that web metrics company Net Applications predicted might happen within a month of the new version's June release. Stalled growth, and Chrome's appearance caused some backslide, but Firefox 3's pulse is getting stronger.