Mozilla announced the beta 3 pre-release of Firefox 3.1. Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 is the fifth development milestone and third beta release of Firefox 3.1, the next version of the Firefox web browser. The release is considered stable, intended for a developers or Firefox community members willing to test the browser and provide feedback.
Here’s a list of what’s new in beta 3:
- This beta is now available in 64 languages – get your local version.
- Improved the new Private Browsing Mode.
- Improvements to web worker thread support.
- Improved performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
- New native JSON support.
- Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
- Support for new web technologies such as the <video> and <audio> elements, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, CSS 2.1 and 3 properties, SVG transforms and offline applications.
<video> and <audio> support is great, a first step to a non-proprietary multimedia support in browsers. Google Gears already support the W3C Geolocation API, and Aza Raskin has published some interesting ideas on Geolocation API and Firefox. You’ll find more details on the beta release in the official Mozilla Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 release notes.
