In an attempt to push developers forward with getting their extensions ready for the upcoming release of Firefox 3.1, they have started a new page dedicated to reporting on the current status of compatibility with addons, and information for developers detailing how they can get their addon compatible.
So far it's not looking good:
54% of addon's are not compatible with any version of Firefox 3.1,
14% work with Alpha versions of Firefox 3.1,
3% work with 3.1 Beta versions,
and 29% work with the latest nightly.
If you're interested in seeing how this progresses, go and check out their Compatibility Centre.
It wasn't that long ago Mozilla Labs was talking about the Aurora concept browser that they envisioned for the future. Now they're talking a little more short term, with something they're planning to add to Firefox in the very near future. This is the idea of "contextual tabs". What they mean by this is that when opening a new tab it will give a search box on the page as this is what most users open a new tab to do, but it will also provide additional information based on any highlighted text from the last tab. So if you highlighted an address on the previous tab then on this new tab it will provide an option to see that address on a map.
The other new concept that they're talking about is providing news in the tab area - this concept I'm not so keen on but it's still worth watching the video on it.
The current nightly build of Firefox has made a bit of noise around the internet in certain circles due to the new optimisation techniques Mozilla are using to greatly increase the performance of JavaScript. Previously, performance concerns have often been mentioned with regards to Firefox, but now it looks like at least once performance issue will no longer be a problem in Firefox 3.1 when it is released.
Ars Technica has posted a number of graphs indicating the performance differences between "Tracemonkey" and Firefox 3 when using various JavaScript. One example of the improvement is for function calls. If Firefox 3 was benchmarked at 1.0, then Tracemonkey is 26 times faster. I'd say that's pretty impressive, but when you look at the performance increase for global loops it's even better!
The first patch for Firefox 3 has been released by Mozilla, fixing:
MFSA 2008-36 Crash with malformed GIF file on Mac OS X
MFSA 2008-35 Command-line URLs launch multiple tabs when Firefox not running
MFSA 2008-34 Remote code execution by overflowing CSS reference counter
Fixed several stability issues.
Fixed an issue where the phishing and malware database did not update on first launch.
Under certain circumstances, Firefox 3.0 did not properly save the SSL certificate exceptions list.
Updated the internal Public Suffix list.
In certain cases, installing Firefox 2 in the same directory in which Firefox 3 has been installed resulted in Firefox 2 being unstable. This issue was fixed as part of Firefox 2.0.0.15.
Fixed an issue where, when printing a selected region of content from the middle of a page, some of the output was missing (bug 433373).
Fixed a Linux issues where, for users on a PPP connection (dialup or DSL) Firefox always started in "Offline" mode (bug 424626).
Hopefully it won't introduce any more JavaScript bugs like the upgrade from 2 to 3 did.
With the new version of Firefox being just 2 days away now from being released, Mozilla are trying... (Read more)
About the blogger
I am a web developer working for a company that specialises in websites for government and enterprise clients. On this site I publish articles on Web development, web design, and other topics such as tweaking the performance of games and movie reviews.
