Firefox 3.1 is just around the corner and I’ve been using the beta’s for a couple of months now, but I didn’t really feel the urge to write about it up until now. But with things heating up between Google Chrome (already out of beta!), Safari and Firefox and with new versions of MS Internet Explorer and Opera in the making as well, one can’t really stay indifferent I guess?
First off; a non-exhaustive list of changes;
- support for <audio> and <video> elements (cfr. html5 draft specs), with ogg/vorbis, wav and ogg/theora compiled in
- lots of css-improvements
- Javascript performance benefits hugely from the new Tracemonkey-engine (just ran Sunspider and got a score of 2482.2ms, compared to approx. 5000ms in FF3 and 20000ms in FF2). Performance could also benefit from webworkers, which allow javascript-webdevelopers to background the execution of javascript.
- javascript-hooks to allow sites to do geolocation
- private browsing (porn-mode, finally!)
- and lots of smaller changes, such as selective tab restore after crashing (so you can kill the culprit which crashed your session), the possibility to move a tab to a new window, support for the “defer”-attribute in the script element, clickable hyperlinks in the source view, …
So if FF3.1 performs that great in Sunspider, does it really feel that much faster as well? To be honest; it doesn’t. Or at least, it didn’t, at first. But here’s a tip; if you’re a bit like me you’re bound to have a lot of extensions installed (and disabled and uninstalled and not compatible and …), you might have some forgotten tweak in your about:config and you probably have huge history and bookmark-databases. In that case do yourself a favor and start from scratch with a new profile and Firefox 3.1 will truly fly.
Off course not all is perfect. I don’t like the fact that tabs inadvertently get moved to a window of their own regularly. And Flash still crashes FF all too often, Firefox really needs something like the process isolation in Google Chrome and MS IE8’s loosely coupled IE, but that might be more than just a small CR.
All in all, with Firefox 3.1 the Mozilla-folks seem to have almost everything to fight the new kid in town. You can download the latest beta here and test for yourself. Let those browser-wars rage!