Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 Rocks!
by Frank Jovine on 10/15/2008 in Internet, Software
Most of what’s new in Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is under the hood. The performance has improved tremendously over the current version and for good reason. Mozilla dramatically improved the JavaScript processing time. Sorry Chrome, it’s just not your day.
Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is available for download. Here are some of the new features and improvements:
- Web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine
- Added support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 properties
- A new tab-switching shortcut that shows previews of the tab you’re switching to
- Improved control over the Smart Location Bar using special characters to restrict your search
- Support for new web technologies such as the <video> and <audio> elements, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, web worker threads, SVG transforms and offline applications.
The new tab-switching feature is really neat (press CTRL+TAB to get a view of all the open tabs), and the special character support for the Awesome Bar makes life a lot easier (for example, you can restrict the search to your history by typing ^, or search only bookmarks using *, or tagged pages with +, if you want to match only text in the URL type @, and for title and tags only use #).
What are your thoughts?
