Firefox 3.1 beta 2 now available!

Editor’s note: Mozilla released Firefox 3.1 beta 1 on Monday, December 8, 2008 at 2:39 pm PT. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement reposted below for more details.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 now available for download

Please note: Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, web compatibility, and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this beta.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 is now available for download. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3.1. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3.1 can be followed at the Firefox 3.1 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #shiretoko.

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

  • This beta is now available in 54 languages – get your local version and let us know if it looks right.
  • A new Private Browsing Mode that allows you to browse without Firefox storing any traces of where you’ve been – perfect for online holiday shopping!
  • New functions that make it easy to remove the history of your past few hours of browsing, or remove all traces of a website.
  • New support for web worker threads.
  • The new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine is now on by default for web content.
  • Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
  • Removed the new tab-switching & preview behavior based on feedback from Beta 1 users
  • Support for new web technologies such as the

Testers can download Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 builds for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in 54 different languages. Developers should also read the Firefox 3.1 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.


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