Firefox 3.1 beta 1 released

The next Firefox in the making.

[swa66]

[developer.mozilla.org...]
Firefox 3.1 beta 1 is available for development use.

This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3.1.

Interesting highlights in my opinion are better CSS2.1 (e.g. :nth-child is finally coming), some more CCS3 already implemented (e.g. image borders, box shadows, text shadow, ...) as well as advances towards (x)html5 (e.g. <video> and <audio> tags).
A scary one from a privacy viewpoint is the javascript API to allow the browser to supply geolocation to the applications.

[DilipShaw]

Now that Google has entered this Browsers business there seems to be a competition (fear?) among these guys. Good for us - we have many good browsers to choose from.

[amznVibe]

Remember that the super fast JIT javascript complier is turned off by default (unless they've suddenly changed that in the beta).

To activate it, go into about:config and search for JIT.
The chrome setting is optional and was kinda buggy in the alpha so you may want to skip it.

Newly supported properties
* text-shadow

Whoa, that is excellent that they finally added that.

[edited by: amznVibe at 8:23 am (utc) on Oct. 15, 2008]

[jcoronella]

Did they fix autocomplete? They broke it in 3.0.1, and they are going to lose me without a fix.

[amznVibe]

Autocomplete was broken? Not on mine.
I've seen firefox config get corrupted to the point where autocomplete won't work however.

[jcoronella]

It is broken with ill-conceived features. When I start with 'w-e-b' it should go to an url that starts with 'web', not to some URL that has the word web in the title. Their new 'enhanced' auto complete is totally useless, and is going to make me switch to chrome.

[amznVibe]

Oh! jcoronella, that is easy to fix, try one of these:
[addons.mozilla.org...]
[addons.mozilla.org...]

There are also some about:config changes you can try.
To match only what you type, change this value to true:
browser.urlbar.matchOnlytyped

[edited by: amznVibe at 5:22 pm (utc) on Oct. 15, 2008]

[anshul]

So many Web sites, so many browsers.
Just a single browser is not good for all of it.

I use 4 of browsers.

[physics]

jcoronella, I had an issue where all CSS was broken. Had to blow away my config and start fresh - no problems after that.

anshul, I agree. Even though I try to limit myself I always seem to have Firefox, Safari and Opera open on my Mac - often with IE open in a virtual machine (and often the virtual machine is running solely for IE!).
If I wasn't a developer it'd probably be different though - Firefox would usually do the trick and I'd only need to run IE on those few sites that don't work in FF (getting smaller every year ;) ).

[CritterNYC]

Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition is available now, too, so you can try out the latest 3.1 Beta without messing up your local install.

[Bernard Marx]

@jcoronella

When I start with 'w-e-b' it should go to an url that starts with 'web', not to some URL that has the word web in the title

I felt the same way for a day or so. All the two-character shortcuts I had been used to using had suddenly been unilaterally forgotten. However, I soon realized that it is actually a very sensible system, especially where pages are within the same site. FF quickly learns which page I most frequently want to go to too.

Now, I wouldn't want to go back. Isn't it always the way ?