Firefox 3.1 beta 1 officially released

Mozilla has announced the availability of the first Firefox 3.1 beta release, an important development milestone for the popular open source web browser. Mozilla aims to make Firefox 3.1 a strong incremental improvement with user interface enhancements, new features, and increased support for emerging web standards. The new beta release includes a modest handful of noteworthy changes that improve the user experience.

• Play with the improved CSS support in Firefox 3.
• Test out the new DOM improvements, especially in regard to support for extensions to the DOM added by other browsers.
• Add power to your web applications with JavaScript 1.8, included in Firefox 3.
• Look through this handy guide on updating web applications for Firefox 3.
• Take advantage of the FUEL library which simplifies many of your most common tasks.
• Experiment with the new Places API, a massive simplification to our history and bookmark platform, providing significantly more functionality and performance.
• Check out the Improvements to XUL in Firefox 3.

Mozilla had originally planned to start code freeze for beta 1 in the middle of August, but decided to delay the beta release and do an additional alpha release instead.

The beta includes Mozilla's new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which uses tracing optimization to deliver a massive performance boost that makes it faster than Google Chrome's V8 engine. Although it still falls short of Apple's recent Squirrelfish Extreme project, the Mozilla developers say that TraceMonkey still leaves plenty of room for additional optimization.

Another major feature that is included in this release is Mozilla's new implementation of the W3C Geolocation Specification. It allows web applications to obtain information about the user's geographical location through a simple JavaScript API. In beta 1, this functionality is built on top of the Loki web service, which is supplied by Skyhook and determines the user's position by comparing local WiFi access points with information in its global reference database. For privacy reasons, the browser will automatically prompt the user before supplying a web site with geolocation data.

Several web sites already have basic support for the feature, including Yahoo's Fire Eagle and the Pownce microblogging service. We tested it with Outside.in Radar, a new web service that displays news headlines and other information about things that are near the user's current location. Earlier this month, Mozilla Labs also released the Geolocation Specification implementation as a Firefox 3.0 extension called Geode so that users and developers can start testing the functionality and incorporating support for the APIs into their web applications without having to use Firefox 3.1 prerelease versions.

The new beta release is available for download from Mozilla's web site and additional information can be found in the official release notes.

Tomorrow I will post my new tutorial for Text Fire Animation