Mozilla's work on the next version of Firefox reached the beta stage, as the organization released Firefox 3.1 beta 1.
The new version is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering engine, which has been under development for six months. Improvements in the latest release include Web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine; added support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 properties; a new tab-switching shortcut that shows previews of the tab you're switching to; and improved control over the Smart Location Bar using special characters to restrict your search.
Firefox 3.1 also adds support for new web technologies such as the video and audio elements, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, web worker threads, SVG transforms and offline applications.
The latest beta can be downloaded from the Mozilla Web site.
"Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 Released" Comments