Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 Preview

This is the third part in my future of web browsers comparison review series. You can find reviews for Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 and Google Chrome here on the site as well.

I don’t have to be a fanboy to say that Firefox simply is the best browser out there right now. It’s certainly not the biggest (today, perhaps “just” 25% of the market), nor the fastest (Chrome has been reported as significantly faster than Firefox 3.1 in tests, although I don’t have any real figures to draw a comparison from.

Introduction
Earlier this week, Mozilla announced the first beta of Firefox 3.1. Although beta reviews (espcially first beta reviews) should always be seen through more judging eyes than usual, I must of course tell you the truth here. Don’t expect anything marvelous and astounding with 3.1. It’ll just be one of those major minor updates to a browser that is already fast, stable and secure.

The background story
I assume you all know Firefox, even those of you who don’t use it. To sum up, it has everything you expect to find in a modern browser. The address bar they introduced in FF3 works great, displaying both recent pages as well as favourites and does a nice job of displaying them. It also has the search box to the right (something that is perhaps better in Chrome, where the two are combined). Bookmarks are easily stored in either the bookmarks menu or the bookmarks field. Security is on par with Internet Explorer and compatibility is perfected (in fact, I’ve seen more than one page nowadays that prompts you to use Firefox for best performance).
The true strength in Firefox is of course its versatility. There are without a doubt thousands of add-ons and skins that can be installed in order to customize Firefox just the way you want it. There are both add-ons and skins for IE as well, but never caught on the way it did for Mozilla.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 1

The beta news
So what’s new in version 3.1? Well, don’t expect anything mind-boggling. There are some really minor UI changes (for example, clicking ctrl-tab brings up a good looking window that helps you switch tabs, just like alt-tab for switching between windows. Like Chrome, Firefox 3.1 also allows you too move tabs between windows (although not just drag them out to create new windows, like you can in Chrome).
Other than that, there is more going on under the hood. This will of course interest developers more than the average web surfer, who just wants the pages to work. In any case, Firefox 3.1 will include support for:

• CSS version 2.1 and 3.0
• Improvements to accomodate web standards
• New technologies like <video> and <audio> elements
• The W3C Geolocation API
• Javascript Query selectors
• Web worker threads
• SVG transforms
• Ability to play .OGG-files
• Offline applications

Verdict
I have, besides that, not noticed any discernible differences to the browser. Speed cannot really be asessed until it is out of beta, because of a lot of debugging code that could be slowing it down.

All-in-all, if you’re a Firefox user, you should definitely get this update when it is released (for compatibility reasons alone). If you’re not, this doesn’t do much to change the switching equation. All I can say is that Firefox is (for now) my main browser, and there’s no reason not to use it. If you’re using something else and you’re happy with it, this update changes nothing for you.

Marcus Näslund
tp640871@hotmail.com
2008-10-19