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It’s a great time to be a web user — the new browser wars are meaning more great features for all of us! Firefox has been hard at work on version 3.1 for a while now, and they’ve just released the second alpha
version of 3.1. So what does it bring to the table?
- The “video element” of HTML 5, which allows for some cool use of video on a site (manipulate with JavaScript, translucent draggable videos, etc) without using Flash.
- Web worker threads, that allow complex JavaScript to run in the background and not disrupt the speed of the page you’re on.
- The highly-touted new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine isn’t yet ready, so it’s not enabled in this release.
- Dragging tabs between windows no longer results in a page refresh.
The next few months will be interesting for Firefox and Chrome. Most of these new features (other than the video element) are things that need to catch up to Chrome. On the flip side, Chomes next big release will likely have a lot of features to try to catch up to Firefox (plug-ins, for one). By the time they both catch up with each other, we should be looking at two amazing browsers!
