After just few days from the release of the first beta of Google Chrome, yesterday Mozilla released the second alpha of Firefox 3.1.
As it is an “alpha” version, this version is intended for developers and users who are willing to accept the experience of bugs and want to report them.
Even so, this alpha of Firefox 3.1 contains many nice features over the 3.0 version released recently:
- Support for the HTML 5 <video> element;
- Initial support for web worker threads;
- You can now drag and drop tabs between browser windows;
- Ability to make use of Aero “Glass” in XUL;
- Support for CSS 2.1 properties: ::before and ::after, and white-space:pre-line;
- Support for CSS 3 properties: -moz-border-image, word-wrap: break-word, text-shadow, box-shadow and column-rule;
- Performance improvements and new preference values for color management profile support.
Future test versions of Firefox 3.1 will also include some improvement in handling JavaScript, with the new JavaScript engine called “TraceMonkey”.
The alpha release of Firefox 3.1 can be downloaded from Mozilla’s Web site
Links
Mozilla announcement: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/3.1a2/releasenotes/.
