Mozilla is rolling out the 3.1 beta of its popular Firefox Web browser March 12. The new version of the open-source browser is intended for developers and testers for evaluation and feedback, but Firefox nonetheless claims that the beta release is stable.
While Microsoft Internet Explorer has a double-digit lead over Firefox with regard to market share, Firefox has still managed to dominate Apple Safari and Google Chrome in terms of percentage of users.
Based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, Beta 3 boasts improvements to Web worker thread support, increased stability with the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, native JSON support, and support for <video> and <audio> elements, W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, CSS 2.1 and 3 properties, and SVG transforms.
Firefox has also improved its Private Browsing Mode, a feature designed for Firefox 3.1 beta and later. Once Private Browsing is turned on, Firefox no longer retains data such as visited pages, cookies, Web cache files, download list entries, or Form or Search Bar entries.
The Beta can be downloaded from this site.
Beta 4 is currently scheduled to roll out in mid-April, to be followed by a release candidate, and then the final release of what will be called Firefox 3.5.
First released in 2004, Firefox is currently the second-most popular Web browser in terms of market share.
Although it lags behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in terms of number of users, Firefox also holds a relatively dominant position, with regard to market share, over Apple’s Safari and Google Chrome.