Mozilla Releases Alpha of Next Firefox

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Mozilla Corp. has released the first preview of Firefox 3.1, the fast-track update that the open-source company has pegged with a late 2008 or early 2009 ship date. Code-named "Shiretoko," named for a national park on Japan's northern-most island of Hokkaido, Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 was delayed several days because of a last-minute bug found in the Mac OS X version.

Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 includes some, but not all, of the features Mozilla hopes to add to the update as work continues. Among the noticeable changes: several improvements to the address bar, which Mozilla dubs the "Smart Location Bar" in recognition of the search enhancements it received in Firefox 3.0; and changes to tab-switching.

Pressing Ctrl-Tab in Alpha 1 switches between current and last-viewed tabs rather than simply moving to the next tab to the right. Thumbnails of each page are also now displayed for easier recognition. Like many of the features slated for Firefox 3.1, the revised tab-switching was originally meant to be included with Firefox 3.0, but had been dropped during development to keep that June version on schedule.

View: Full Article @ PC World

#1 redeemed on 04 Aug 2008 - 07:46

Nice, looking forward to the final.

(2 replies) #2 The_Decryptor on 04 Aug 2008 - 07:52

And the most important new features, is enhanced CSS support, more CSS3 selectors, support for text-shadow and box-shadow, word-wrap, border-image, etc.

Lets hope it gets @font-face and SMIL support by the time it hits final.

#2.1 Cryton on 04 Aug 2008 - 12:35

And built-in theora/ogg support for audio/video streams, and with any luck tracemonkey should land for 3.1 which will give the javascript engine a serious kick up the ass speed-wise and may well require a new test suite to measure JS engine performance (seriously, some of the sunspider tests become so fast they're basically meaningless)

#2.2 supernova_00 on 04 Aug 2008 - 12:40

(Cryton said @ #2.1)

Ogg support landed a day or two after the code was cut for 3.1a1. Which is now working great in today's nightly now that the crashers/memory leaks have been fixed.

#3 Sam Symons Live on 04 Aug 2008 - 07:52

Looking very forward to this.

#4 thealexweb on 04 Aug 2008 - 11:05

I'm running Alpha 1 as my default browser because it's so stable, it has no known issues for Windows, that means they've fixed all the bugs hat were in 3.0.1

(2 replies) #5 boho on 04 Aug 2008 - 11:17

I hate to say this, but Firefox (3.x ) is becoming a Vista like monster. All the easy configuration files are being migrated to multiple database files, which seem to expand and spread everywhere. It seems to me that the whole PC model of computing has become an over complex mess of spaghetti code being turned into spaghetti programs (all over the hard disk). Will this model end? We only have one planet, with finite growth potential, the computing industry need to recognise this and make lightweight O/S's and apps (IMO).

#5.1 Glendi on 04 Aug 2008 - 11:29

All this comment shows you don't have even a little bit knowledge how Firefox IS.

#5.2 Esvandiary on 04 Aug 2008 - 14:46

I'm tempted to agree with Glendi - all the preferences etc are still in good old JS files. What is in databases are things that need to be fast - the awesomebar, for instance, should be an instantly-available resource, not waiting several seconds for it to appear. This type of speed can only really be achieved with non-human-readable databases.

#6 thealexweb on 04 Aug 2008 - 11:23

lightweight O/S's and apps

Erm hello Firefox is one of the lightest of all browsers, a bit liter than browsers like Safari and alot more lightweight than Internet Explorer.

(2 replies) #7 +Kushan on 04 Aug 2008 - 12:01

How does it perform in the Acid3 test?

#7.1 ermax on 04 Aug 2008 - 13:16

It gets to 83 on Acid3.

#7.2 +Kushan on 04 Aug 2008 - 15:05

(ermax said @ #7.1)

Thanks for the info!

Not a bad jump considering this is a feature-incomplete, early alpha.

(3 replies) #8 4tehlulz on 04 Aug 2008 - 12:40

Does Java work? Some of the pre-Alpha builds refused to run Java apps.

#8.1 thealexweb on 04 Aug 2008 - 14:05

Java works fine for me.

#8.2 supernova_00 on 04 Aug 2008 - 16:52

Something was disabled on purpose during the early pre-alpha builds but was turned back on way before Alpha1.

#8.3 supernova_00 on 04 Aug 2008 - 16:53

(2 replies) #9 Flynsarmy on 05 Aug 2008 - 07:55

I hope there'll either be an option or an addon that converts back to the old ctrl+tab behaviour, it's the only annoying
thing i've seen in a Firefox release so far besides the removal of the buttons from find-as-you-type (Thankfully theres
an add-on that puts them back in

#9.1 supernova_00 on 05 Aug 2008 - 14:06

search in about:config and change the pref that has somethign to do with most recently used or MRU to 0. That sets it back to the old way.

#9.2 TigerFX on 06 Aug 2008 - 04:15

I don't see why they'd want to change the ctrl+tab behavior. I love ctrl+tab for forward, ctrl+shift+tab for back. It works really well for me.

I'm glad it's easy to change back.

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