Chicago (IL) - Following the quiet posting of the Firefox 3.1 beta 2 yesterday , Mozilla added official information about the software earlier, which sheds more light on the release and clears some initial confusion. As we suspected, Mozilla confirmed that the beta 2 focuses on developer needs and some new features have been postponed and are now scheduled to surface in the third beta.
"Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback," wrote Mozilla. "It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, web compatibility, and speed." The organization also added that this release of Firefox 3.1 is focused on "testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3.1."
Mozilla noted that the "platform changes" include the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 7 months, and now features speculative parsing for faster content rendering. Mozilla said that developers should view Gecko 1.9.1 as an "incremental release on the previous version" but mentioned that there are "significant changes" to improve web compatibility, performance, and ease of use.” The optimized Javascript interpreter TraceMonkey is now also part of the deal and comes turned on by default.
Other Mozilla-confirmed features for yesterday's release include a localization for 54 languages, a new Private Browsing mode with a new self-descriptive mask icon that ensures that no cookies, forms, URLs and pages are stored during the private browsing session, a new feature to clear the recent browsing history by time as well as an option to remove all traces of a website, the support for web worker threads, and support for emerging web technologies like the <video> and <audio> tags, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, CSS 2.1 and 3 properties, SVG transforms and offline applications. Mozilla also said that this release removed the new tab-switching behavior as a result of feedback from users - a missing tweak we pointed out in our review.
The official list of changes confirms TG Daily's thoughts on Firefox 3.1 beta 2: This release is in fact focused on add-on developers the open-source organization recently called upon to update their existing add-ons for Firefox 3.1.
This means that developers should expect beta 2 to act as a stable code base to run add-ons. Some readers may have noticed that developers have been hesitant to update their add-ons for Firefox 3.1 so far. Given that Mozilla recently added a beta 3 to the development schedule and labeled the beta 2 as a developer-only release, this means that Firefox 3.1 beta is not yet feature complete. Features that are still missing should appear in the upcoming beta 3.
"Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback," wrote Mozilla. "It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, web compatibility, and speed." The organization also added that this release of Firefox 3.1 is focused on "testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3.1."
Mozilla noted that the "platform changes" include the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 7 months, and now features speculative parsing for faster content rendering. Mozilla said that developers should view Gecko 1.9.1 as an "incremental release on the previous version" but mentioned that there are "significant changes" to improve web compatibility, performance, and ease of use.” The optimized Javascript interpreter TraceMonkey is now also part of the deal and comes turned on by default.
Other Mozilla-confirmed features for yesterday's release include a localization for 54 languages, a new Private Browsing mode with a new self-descriptive mask icon that ensures that no cookies, forms, URLs and pages are stored during the private browsing session, a new feature to clear the recent browsing history by time as well as an option to remove all traces of a website, the support for web worker threads, and support for emerging web technologies like the <video> and <audio> tags, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, CSS 2.1 and 3 properties, SVG transforms and offline applications. Mozilla also said that this release removed the new tab-switching behavior as a result of feedback from users - a missing tweak we pointed out in our review.
The official list of changes confirms TG Daily's thoughts on Firefox 3.1 beta 2: This release is in fact focused on add-on developers the open-source organization recently called upon to update their existing add-ons for Firefox 3.1.
This means that developers should expect beta 2 to act as a stable code base to run add-ons. Some readers may have noticed that developers have been hesitant to update their add-ons for Firefox 3.1 so far. Given that Mozilla recently added a beta 3 to the development schedule and labeled the beta 2 as a developer-only release, this means that Firefox 3.1 beta is not yet feature complete. Features that are still missing should appear in the upcoming beta 3.