Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 is Out, and Feels Fast and Stable

If you’ve been using the beta versions of the Firefox 3.1 browser, as I have, you know that it’s significantly faster than previous versions, and has quite a few new, useful features. Mozilla is out now with Beta 3 of Firefox 3.1, which you can download here. I’m finding it fast, and more stable than the previous betas.

Here’s what’s included, and some news about forward-going plans for future betas and the release candidate of the browser.


First, there had been some speculation that the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine wouldn’t make it into Firefox 3.1, but it is included in Beta 3. Mozilla has attributed delays in the Firefox 3.1 beta release schedule to this. Faster JavaScript performance in the browser will make a performance difference, and web workers should find that it especially speeds up web-hosted applications.

The Private Browsing Mode is also in good working order in the third beta, and you can choose to “Forget This Site” from your History sidebar. Native JSON support is also under the hood.

Mozilla is slated to release a fourth beta on April 14, but the release candidate that is to follow will be called Firefox 3.5, as will the final release. According to blog posts from Mozilla, this is to call out the significant improvements in the browser, although I wonder if a higher number alone really does that.

I’ve been using the Firefox 3.1 betas alongside Google Chrome for a while now, and while Chrome gets a lot of kudos from users for being fast, and tends to win on some benchmark tests, I find the two browsers to run about neck-and-neck in actual use. Firefox continues to be the best browser for me, primarily due to the arrays of useful extensions available for it. If you’re a Firefox user who hasn’t tried the beta versions due to stability concerns, Beta 3 feels stable enough to me to use as my primary browser. You may want to give it a try at this point.

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