Mozilla Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 Released

Mozilla Firefox 3.0 was a major hit but because of the lack of time some features that were originally planned to be added in Firefox 3.0 were held and now are going to be added to the next major release of Firefox browser that is Firefox 3.1 code named “shiretoko”, these features include Support for the <video> tag as defined in the HTML 5 specification,Support for cross-site XMLHttpRequests (XHR) which would allow more powerful web applications,Native JSON DOM binding a powerful feature for web developers, full CSS 3 selector support, bookmark tag autocomplete, bulk tagging support, private browsing mode for corporate users,advanced search UI, a lightweight tagging user interface, integration of a browser’s download history and last but not the least Visual Tab switching which adds Thumbnail previews for tab switching (alt+tab). The final release of Firefox 3.1 is expected to be released in the last quarter of this year or first quarter of 2009 and will run on Gecko 1.9.1 Engine.

The most exciting feature of Firefox 3.1 is the Visual Tab switching feature which has been inspired by Ctrl-Tab Firefox extension, when you press alt+tab on your keyboard you are shown thumbnails along with the titles of the pages which allows you to recognise the tab you want to open quickly just like the Windows Vista Aero’s Alt+Tab Feature, to revert back to the old tab switching you need to use keys Ctrl + Page Up and Ctrl + Page Down, To know more about this feature read this.

If you want to try out the new features you can download Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 from the Official Firefox FTP site.