Mozilla quietly released Firefox 3.1 beta 2 over the weekend. Strangely enough, the software has not been announced and does not include release notes, implying that it should be seen as a small code refresh towards the third and final beta. However, during our first full day of testing, we spotted several new additions, including a much-improved crash recovery, a redesigned privacy mode page and new options to delete portions of the browsing history.
We recently reported on a release candidate of Firefox 3.1 beta 2 on Mozilla’s servers and it has not taken long for the “final” beta to surface. Mozilla posted the software on its FTP servers this past weekend, but the installation file is dated December 5 and left us scratching our heads: Although it definitely brings the updated code compared to the recent beta 2 release candidate, it appears that the software did not bring all end-user features of the shipping version. Mozilla originally said that beta 2 will be feature complete. Since it tweaked the development schedule with a third beta, we now believe that there will be a few more features in beta 3.
The base of the browser remains the updated Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform and an optimized TraceMonkey JavaScript interpreter that is turned on by the default (previous versions required a manual tweak to activate Tracemonkey.) The updated software also shows improved results in Acid3 test that measure how well a browser conforms to web standards. The new build scored 93/100 on our test machine, while the Beta 1 scored 89/100. Beta versions of Opera 10 and Safari 4 score 100/100, which makes them the two most web standards-compliant browsers on the market.
Monday, December 8, 2008
Firefox 3.1 beta2
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