Mozilla Releases Firefox 3.1 beta 2 with Private Browsing Feature

Submitted by lalit on December 9, 2008 - 8:53pm.

If you are the adventurous kind Firefox 3.1 beta 2 is now available for download. The new features and changes included in beta 2 are:

  • A new Private Browsing Mode that allows you to browse without Firefox storing any traces of where you’ve been.
  • 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 TraceMonkey JavaScript engine is now on by default for web content.
  • Improvements to Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
  • Tab-switching and preview behavior removed based on feedback from Beta 1 users.
  • Support for new web technologies such as the <video> and <audio> elements, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, CSS 2.1 and 3 properties, SVG transforms and Offline applications.

The Firefox 3.1 beta 2 is very stable and Tracemonkey has definitely improved it JavaScript performance. But then also we would like to caution our readers that it’s a beta release and there might be some unresolved issues. Ars Technica has posted a detailed first look for the Firefox 3.1 beta 2 on their website.
[Via Mozilla Developer Center]