Mozilla Makes Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 Available

By: Mary Couchman
Staff Writer
Published: Dec 5, 2008

Mozilla is set to release Firefox 3.1 beta 2. The new Internet Web browser will feature a new Javascript rendering engine called Tracemonkey. Other improvements include crash recovery and private browsing.

Mozilla Corp is set to release its latest version of the Firefox Web browser. The new Firefox 3.1 beta 2 release will be the last beta before Mozilla introduces its final version.

Firefox users have been beta testing beta 1 since last October. The official release for Firefox 3.1 is due in early 2009.

The first beta offered support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 properties. A new tab-switching shortcut was added which previews a tab you're switching to. Mozilla also added support for new Internet Web technologies for both video and audio elements, HTML 5, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, and Web worker threads.

Web worker threads are used to run tasks in the background in Firefox. The Web technology is part of the new HTML 5 specification. Most users will probably use Web workers to support multi-core PCs to increase browser speeds.

Beta 2 will features a new Javascript rendering engine called Tracemonkey. Tracemonkey speeds up Javascript and greatly improves its performance.

Private browsing is another new feature in Firefox 3.1 which restricts logging information on sites you browse. When the private mode is enabled, it will also reject any cookies and will keep URLs out of the browser history. Microsoft Corp's Internet Explorer, Apple Inc's Safari, and Google Inc's Chrome also have this feature.

The new Firefox beta version also has an improved crash recovery system. Firefox 3.1 will prompt users on which tabs to restore after a browser crash. Users can restore certain windows without losing their entire Web session.