14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla is making headway in the development of the first Beta of Firefox 3.1. Built under the codename Shiretoko, the successor of Firefox 3.0 reached the Alpha 2 milestone at the end of the past week and became available for download. In addition to Shiretoko Beta 1, Mozilla is also cooking the Firefox 2.0.0.17 and Firefox 3.0.1 security and stability updates, also due by the end of this month. Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2 follows Google Chrome Beta and Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 to the market.
"The second developer milestone of the next release of Firefox - code named Shiretoko Alpha 2 - is now available for download. Shiretoko is built on pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 platform, which forms the core of rich Internet applications such as Firefox. Please note that this release is intended for developers and testers only," stated Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's User Experience lead.
According to Mozilla's plans, the first Beta Build of Firefox 3.1 is slated for October 2008, a delivery deadline designed to permit the integration of feedback from the Alpha 2 release. Even though there are development milestones of Firefox 3.1 complete with the new Tracemonkey JavaScript engine, the technology was not included into Alpha 2. Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 will lead the way to Beta 2 build which is currently planned for availability in the October-November timeframe.
"This Alpha of Shiretoko / Gecko 1.9.1 introduces several new features: Support for the HTML 5 < video > element; initial support for web worker threads; you can now drag and drop tabs between browser windows; themers can specify where to use Aero “Glass” in XUL; support for CSS 2.1 properties: ::before and ::after, and white- space:pre-line; support for CSS 3 properties: -moz-border-image, word-wrap: break-word, text-shadow, box-shadow and column-rule; performance improvements and new preference values for color management profile support," Beltzner added.
Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 for Windows is available for download here. Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 for Linux is available for download here. Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 for Mac OS X is available for download here.