Firefox 3.1 (Shiretoko) planned features draft

[Borimol]

As Firefox 3 approaches its grand debut this next Tuesday, for Mozilla developers it means the end of a development cycle and the start of another. Firefox 3.next is the tentative name for the next relatively minor update to the Firefox 3 branch, which is most likely to become Firefox 3.1.

A very early draft of planned features reveals that as expected, this release will be mainly about landing stuff that didn?t make it on time for the Firefox 3, along with the usual performance, stability and security bug fixes.

Visual tab switching and tab searching/filtering were both tried for Firefox 3, abandoned for other more critical features, and are being considered for 3.1. Ctrl+Tab, a extension developed by Dao Gottwald implements both of them displaying a thumbnail of the opened tabs when pressing Ctrl + Tab to switch tabs.

<It also modifies the List all tabs tab bar button to show tabs thumbnails you can search.b>

<Ctrl+Tab, compatible with Firefox 3, is available at Mozilla Add-ons if you want to try these features.b>

Places would also receive several improvements like integrating the downloads history in the Library as it was planned for Firefox 3, so you could define smart folders of downloaded files. Regarding smart folders, the interface for advanced queries (like multiple criteria) that was available in the first betas and pulled back for performance concerns, would also come back.

Options for bulk tagging bookmarks and tag autocomplete are also being considered.

Add these to previously announced support for <video> tag, cross site Ajax requests, more power for the location bar, and some recently added support for CSS 3 selectors (which will improve Firefox score inthe Acid3 test), and we can already foresee an interesting update.

Following the tradition of using places as Firefox code names, Firefox 3.1 has been named Shiretoko after the Japanese national park.

Planning Center: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3.1

Very Early Draft: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3.1/Features

Via: Mozillalinks.org

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Edited June 13, 2008 by Borimol

[+vlsi0n Subscriber¹]

Sounds like it'll be an update worth downloading :yes:.

[+Mystic MVC]

Awesome, sounds like they have me hooked for a while. :p

[zhangm Supervisor]

Seeing how things get pushed back, maybe Safari will beat them and implement these features first...

[Calum Veteran]

Thanks for the information! Sounds interesting :)

I hope they just get Silverlight recognition working correctly & Quicktime videos on the Apple website...

After looking at these possibilities for Firefox 3.1, I wonder what will be in Firefox 3.2 then ;)

[what]

The only thing that sucks is the codename (imo).

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

They're making good progress with 3.1 (the nightlies are available)

text-shadow support landed yesterday, Safari has had support for that for ages.

[arrrgh]

woohooo, text shadow.. about as useful as marquee

[Punio4]

I hope they make image resizing better quality than the current bilinear filter...

Opera uses bicubic or lancoz if I'm not mistaken.

[Sam Symons Veteran]

Seeing how things get pushed back, maybe Safari will beat them and implement these features first...

Meh. Even is Safari beats them first, I'm still not changing browsers.

[torrentthief]

As long as they can pass acid test3 it will be worth the update to 3.1 as 3.0 is about as perfect as it gets really. Well a built in adblocker would be nice, but adblock plus is good enough for me.

[Bryan000]

those installers above are PRE-Alpha and they also have some pretty serious issues with plugins at the moment (yes, i mean plugins not add-ons). We won't see a lot of interesting changes for the 3.1 branch until after 3.0 has launched.

[Smigit]

As long as they can pass acid test3 it will be worth the update to 3.1 as 3.0 is about as perfect as it gets really. Well a built in adblocker would be nice, but adblock plus is good enough for me.

to me from the article it doesnt sound like they are shooting to pass acid 3 with this release, but will just improve on where they are. Also can't see it listed in the feature list, although admittedly passing acid 3 isn't really a "feature" anyway.

On an aside, those tabs with the preview images is how they should implement it in the mobile release using some quick access button to bring up the pane with the previews. A lot nicer and simpler than that ridiculous 2d clipboard like thing they had going on in that video that was posted earlier.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

It's got 7 points more on Acid3 than 3.0, but it probably won't get much more (unless people sit down and start writing patches)