• Ars Technica, Wednesday, October 15, 2008 12:15 PM

Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is officially here, and Ars Technica has an in-depth look at its features and functionality. Mozilla hopes to make this latest version a strong incremental improvement with user interface enhancements, new features, and increased support for emerging web standards.

The new server includes an improved JavaScript engine, which supposedly makes it faster than Google Chrome's V8 engine - except it isn't quite enabled by default, and appears buggy. It also includes a W3C Geolocation Specification, which allows Web applications to obtain information about the user's geographical location through a simple JavaScript API. There are other enhancements as well under the works that were not included in the beta version.

The bottom line? Users can look forward to a great 3.1 release, which boasts plenty of improvements. The new beta release is available for download now from Mozilla's Web site.

Read the whole story at Ars Technica »