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The delay is finally over! Mozilla has recently released Firefox 3.1 beta 1 (code-named “Shiretoko”) for public testing.

What should a web developer expect?

Web developers will definitely be delighted to know that the @font-face CSS property is implemented in Shiretoko. This will allow web developers to design websites with consistent formatting and layout. New CSS properties such as text-shadow and word-wrap are also supported.

New HTML tags are also introduced: namely, the <video> and the <audio> tags; both tags simplify the embedding of video and audio files on a web page. It must be noted that the <video> and the <audio> tags only support the OGG Theora and OGG Vorbis formats.

HTML and CSS aside, Shiretoko also contains some changes to its Javascript parsing behavior. This beta adds support for the “defer” attribute for the <script> element. What it does is that it allows a block of Javascript to be parsed AFTER rendering a web page. The current behavior of most browsers is to parse scripts while it renders the web page, which means buggy and nonresponsive scripts will cause the browser to hang before displaying the rendered web page.

What should a web surfer expect?

Among the graphical user interface changes are a new and improved smart location bar, and the ability to preview tabs when using a tab-switching shortcut. Users should also experience major improvements in the performance and speed of rendering web pages due to the new Gecko 1.9.1 rendering engine. The speed may be comparable to that of Google Chrome’s Webkit engine, coupled with the notoriously fast JavaScript Virtual machine called V8.

Pressing Ctrl + Tab will bring up a small translucent window in the middle of the screen showing thumbnails of currently opened tabs. You can scroll through the thumbnails by continuing to tap on the tab button while holding on Ctrl.

Addons compatibility is a real pain in the arse! If you’re just a casual surfer and depend on a lot of addons, I would suggest NOT to download beta versions. Things would be different for a web developer, though.

Download [Mozilla] Via [T3] Read [Mozilla Developer Center]