The Minority Report

I know I’m being capricious with my browser update posts. I slam Opera and IE8 in some, make fun of people posting about point releases in another and then post a nice, calm note about the new Firefox.

Well, I like Firefox so suck it.

The third beta of the Firefox 3.1 web browser has been released by the Mozilla development team just a few hours ago. It can be downloaded from the official website in all supported languages and for all supported operating systems. The release notes contain information about the improvements in this beta version of the Firefox web browser including performance and stability improvements with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, native JSON support, private browsing improvements, improvements to the Gecko layout engine with one of the effects being faster content rendering and support of new web technologies such as CSS 2.1 and 3 properties, offline applications and audio and video elements.
Web Browser: Firefox 3.1 Beta 3

Here is a short list of some of the changes and improvements to Firefox 3.1 beta3:

Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under
development for the past 9 months. Firefox 3.1 is an incremental release on the previous version
with significant changes to improve web compatibility, performance, and ease of use:

• This beta is now available in 64 languages – get your local version.
• Improved the new Private Browsing Mode.
• Improvements to web worker thread support.
• Improved performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey
  JavaScript engine.
• New native JSON support.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as the <video> and <audio> elements, the W3C
  Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, CSS 2.1 and 3 properties, SVG transforms and offline
  applications.

Developers can find out about all the changes and
new features at the Mozilla Developer Center.

Mozilla Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 Release Notes

I just started looking into JSON^W for some of my development needs and so far think it’s pretty cool. I’m sure the six other readers of this blog are already JSON experts but those of us with an IQ of 6 need some time to adjust to all this technology thrown at us.