The newest beta for Firefox was announced Monday. The biggest new feature is the Private Browsing mode, which for the paranoid is a welcome improvement as it doesn’t keep any traces of your activity on the browser. It has focused on improving on standards compliance. It scored 93/100 on the Acid3 web standards test. For reference Firefox 3.0.4 scored 71/100 and IE 6 a mesealy 12/100. Other improvements are:
- New support for web worker threads: allow web developers to use JavaScript in the background to not affect page load times.
- The new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine is now on by default for web content.
- Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
- Support for new web technologies such as W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, CSS 2.1 and 3 properties, SVG transforms and offline applications
From limited testing on my part it does seem a little snappy and it doesn’t eat up nearly as much memory. Get the beta here: Mozilla Developer Center
