Beta-testing of Firefox 3.1

29th October 2008

The developers presented the first trial release of a new version of the popular open source Web-browser Firefox 3.1 Beta 1.
This is the first public test build of Firefox with the new JavaScript-engine Tracemonkey, increasing performance of some operations by dozens of times. Among other innovations in Firefox 3.1 the developers point out the better compliance to Web-standards in the engine Gecko, support of the parameters of new specifications of cascading sheets CSS 2.1 and CSS 3; an opportunity to preview tabs when switching between them; improved management of Smart Location Bar at the expense of the use of special characters that prohibit search; support for new Web-technologies (video and audio tags of HTML 5 specification, as well as W3C Geolocation API, selectors of requests JavaScript, and offline-applications).
The second beta release of Firefox 3.1 is expected in mid-November.