Now that personas are available for Firefox 3.6, the original extension has been rebranded as Personas Plus, as it provides even more functionality. Here are a few reasons you may want to try Personas Plus:

• Browse personas by category, popularity, and most recently added. With over 35,000 personas, this one is really helps you reach the best when there’s no much time.
• Have your favorites on hand. You will need to register at getpersonas.com, so you can mark your and save your favorite personas to have them easily accessible from the Personas Plus’ status bar menu.

• Make your own persona. First, you have to enable the Custom Persona menu option via Personas Plus’ preferences. Then you can set colors and images for your toolbars and status bar background.

• Combine themes and personas. This is one of the most common complaints I have heard about Personas implementation in Firefox: you can’t mix themes and personas. While I can understand this is an uncommon case for  most users, I don’t get why this capability was removed from the latest Personas Plus 1.5. If you install the previous version 1.4 you will be able to have a themes’ button icons for example on top of the persona. Below is the

Get Personas Plus at Mozilla Add-ons.

The result: perhaps the most extensively tested Firefox release, with just above 1 million users by the release candidate stage, which helps Firefox 3.6 be a robust release for an increasingly more competitive, healthier web browser market. Let’s see what’s inside.

Personas

Personsas is definitely the main feature for this release. Also called lightweight themes, unlike full featured themes which allow to change every aspect of the UI (widgets, backgrounds, colors, fonts), personas focus on just changing the status bar and toolbars backgrounds, without requiring an application restart, and making it pretty easy to preview the personas in Mozilla Add-ons.

With more than 10 million extension downloads (for Firefox 3.5 and before), and more than 30,000 available, Personas (now Personas Plus) has been a wild success months before becoming a default Firefox feature.  It is still available, and maintained,  and still adds a couple of advanced features that could attract users: the ability to load your own persona by selecting a couple of files from your computer, and an option to browse Mozilla Add-ons’ personas, and create a set of favorites if you create an account.

User Experience

Firefox 3.5 introduced support for native Theora videos in web pages using the HTML5 <video> tag. Now, there’s an option to see videos in full screen mode. Just right-click on the video and select Full Screen.

Talking about full screen, a new full screen button is available from the Customize Toolbars dialog, available from View menu, Toolbars/Customize, so you don’t have to reach the View menu, or remember the F11 hot key.

A small but significant change: if you attempt to launch Firefox while only non content windows are open (like the Add-ons or Downloads Manager), Firefox won’t create a new window as before but restore the last closed window.

New is also the tab preview and the ability to search tabs by title and URL, though not enabled by default. You will have to set browser.ctrlTab.previews to true via about:confige. Then, when you press Ctrl + Tab to switch tabs, a tab panel appears. Also the List all tabs button in the the bar far right, now displays a thumbnail of all open tabs, where you can select, close, or search.

There is also a couple of new tabbed browsing behaviors. First, tabs opened from a web page (like when you middle-click or select Open Link in New Tab from the link’s context menu), are opened to the right of the current tab instead of the last one’s.  The second change is disabled by default and makes single Ctrl + Tab key presses switch between the current and the previous tab, instead of moving through all the tabs. To enable it, set browser.ctrlTab.mostRecentlyUsed to true.

Autocomplete suggestions in previously filled web forms are now sorted by frecency, a combined indicator that tells how frequently and how recently an option was used. A nice addition for users who frequently fill out web forms.

On Windows, there’s a new option to hide the menu bar and gain a few thousand pixels for web pages. Right click on the navigation or menu bar and uncheck the Menu Bar item to have it gone for good.

When you need support, there is a way to easily get and share most details about your Firefox setup. In the Help menu, select Troubleshooting Information… to open about:support, a page that summarizes your installed extensions, customized preferences, links to your plugins, and build details, and allows you to quickly copy everything to the clipboard so you can paste it in a support forum post or email.

Not as helpful, about:memory is a first approach to providing details about web pages and tabs resources usage, similar to Chrome’s task manager. Right now it basically only shows Firefox total memory usage. It should make much more sense once multi-process architecture starts landing in coming versions.

What’s not here is support for some of Windows 7’s most useful features: there are no jump lists, no tab preview, and no download status in the taskbar either. However, now that Mozilla is open to including new features in maintenance releases, I really hope this lands in some of the early next updates.

Actually, taskbar preview is available in Firefox 3.6, but it is buggy and not really worth enabling. If you still want to try it, access about:config and set browser.taskbar.previews.enable to true.

Also available is accelerometer support which allows web applications know the current mobile device orientation to react accordingly.

Web Enhancement

Mozilla is now supporting the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) for embedded fonts which has several advantages over TrueType and OpenType, like smaller size thanks to compression, and the ability to trace the source of a specific font without the burden of DRM.

With multiple file input, you can select several files for a single file input area, so it is easier to upload. Now, web developers, please use it! It’s always been a pain to upload photos to any photo sharing or printing service unless you use a proprietary plugin or a Java applet.

A new API will now allow add-on developers access Firefox’s geolocation features, and better standard interfaces for easier drag and drop in web pages should make web developers’ lives easier.

It scores 94 in Acid3 (the web standards compliance test), one point more than Firefox 3.5.

Security and Stability

The Firefox components directory is now locked down, which means no third party provider will be able to write to Firefox’s components folder. More details in Mozilla Developer Center.

The extensions.checkCompatibility preference is now less relaxed. In the past, it has been abused by users as a way to force incompatible extensions to work with newer Firefox versions. The preference is still there but it will have to be more explicit. For example to force them to work with Firefox 3.6, you will have to add extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6 and set it to  false. For future versions you will need to set extensions.checkCompatibility.3.7 to false and so on. See Dave Townsend’s post for more details.

Another important addition is an option to check for plugin updates. To do so, just press Find Updates in the Plugins page in the Add-ons Manager. The Plugin Check page will test your browser, report on what plugins are outdated, and provide links to where you can find the latest versions.

Performance

TraceMonkey, the JavaScript optimizer has been futher improved. In my tests, it took about 15% less time than Firefox 3.5 to complete the SunSpider test suite (from 1775ms to 1254ms in my Thinkpad T400). Thanks to stability gains, it is also enabled for improving chrome code as well. Remember the whole Firefox user interface runs on JavaScript.

Per tab network prioritization makes Firefox allocate more bandwidth for the currently viewed tab, less for other tabs in the current window and even less for other windows, enhancing the perceived responsiveness.

What’s Next

Lorentz. The next major update will run plugins (or at least Flash) on their own processes to improve overall stability. It, however, won’t come as a major update but as an update to Firefox 3.6 (around 3.6.2), marking a change in Mozilla approach to minor updates. There are a few other updates that may be included, but nothing is clear right now.

Download Firefox 3.6 now. Release Notes.

Once installed you can set your home page, the current page, or a web address (URL) you enter as the content to show when adding a new tab.

Pretty simple, pretty useful. Try it at Mozilla Add-ons.

To get all your tabs back, just press Esc or close the filter bar.

It works really great. My only complaint is that Tab Filter/Tab Search desperately needs a keyboard shortcut to activate the filter bar. (And a shorter name!)

Pretty simple and pretty useful as it helps to get rid of the status bar and gain a few extra screen lines.

Get URL Tooltip from Mozilla Add-ons.

Fear no more thanks to Long URL Mobile Expander, a Firefox extension created by Sean Murphy, that reveals the true destination of obfuscated URLs using the LongURL web service that covers more than 200 URL shortening services.

You can get Long URL Mobile expander from Mozilla Add-ons.

Tab Progress Bar, developed by Frank Yan, adds just this feature which I found so far to be more informational than the old common progress bar in the status area.

Get Tab Progress Bar from Mozilla Add-ons.

Before starting the review, keep in mind that Firefox 3.6 will be the smallest upgrade Mozilla has released to date. Before this, version jumps have been in the 0.5 (Firefox 1.0 to 1.5, 3.0 to 3.5) or 1.0 (2.0 to 3.0) order, and while version numbers are not mathematically representative, the slight 0.1 version increase reflects the overall tone of this update, and Firefox development in general which is moving to a faster release pace.

Personas

Without a doubt, the most significant addition is support for lightweight themes, also known as personas, that was previously only available with the Personas extension.

A persona, which consists of a couple of images used as backgrounds for the toolbar and status bar areas, and setting a text color, is very simple to author, yet it significantly changes the appearance of Firefox and becomes a way of expression for the user.

To try it, simply visit Mozilla Add-ons, and go to the recently added Personas section. Personas are live previewed as you hover on the thumbnails, and become permanent when you click on Wear It.

Themes after all, personas are also managed via the Themes page in the Add-ons Manager.

Tabbed browsing

Firefox has finally got tab preview, though it’s turned off by default. To activate it, you must set browser.ctrlTab.previews to true via about:config. After that, when you press Ctrl + Tab to switch tabs, you get a horizontal line of tab thumbnails.

You can also press Ctrl + Shift + Tab to get a preview of all currently loaded tabs, and even search the tabs’ titles which comes very handy when having more than 20 or so at a time.

about:

A couple of special about: pages have been added. about:support, should become a troubled user’s best friend as it provides a helpful page with most details of your current Firefox settings including version number, customized preferences, and installed extensions; all of which can be easily copied to a support forum, email or chat window.

about:memory, is a first try on providing details about the current Firefox memory consumption.

Usability

Native videos now have a full screen option: right click on a video and select Full screen. On related news, a new full screen button is now available to add to the toolbars.

Tabs opened from a page (like when middle-clicking on a link) now open to the right of the current tab making it easier to reach content that we know is related to what we’re currently on.

A small but significant change: if you attempt to launch Firefox while only non content windows are open (like the Add-ons or Downloads Manager), Firefox won’t create a new window as before but restore the last closed window.

Autocomplete suggestions in previously filled web forms are now sorted by frecency, a combined indicator that tells how frequently and how recently an option was used. A nice addition useful in very particular cases though.

Internals

As announced before, Mozilla is now supporting the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) which has the advantages of smaller size thanks to compression, and the ability to trace the source of a specific font without the burden of DRM.

TraceMonkey, the JavaScript just-in-time optimization technology introduces with Firefox 3.5 is now also enabled by default for the user interface, which relies on JavaScript for much of its functionality as well.

Finally, this beta introduces support for the new Windows 7’s taskbar previews feature. Don’t get too attached to it though, as it is buggy right now and may be pulled back depending on how it evolves in the next few days.

Next

Further Windows 7 integration like showing a download progress bar in the taskbar and jump lists are also in the works but unlikely to be ready for Firefox 3.6.

The current nightlies are labeled pre 3.6 beta 2 suggesting a second beta may be the next step. This would be in line with the latest roadmap.

Not much is left for future development releases. One final feature could be per tab network prioritization which will make Firefox allocate more bandwidth for the currently viewed tab, less for other tabs in the current window and even less for other windows, enhancing the perceived responsiveness.

As usual, a critical subject are add-ons. Right now about half of them have been updated to some 3.6 development release. You can help increase this number by installing the Add-on Compatibility Reporter. Once installed, all your extensions will be enabled. You can then check and see if they work or not, then go to the Add-ons Manager and report whether it works or not.

(Not that) Surprisingly, there is a Firefox extension that will help anyone create a MathML expression of really complex mathematical equations. FireMath, created by MrBont gets the job done, and allows you to save the formula as a full XHTML file, a stand alone or inline equation, or an image file.

There’s some obvious work to be done on the user interface front, but for science paper authors, this should come in handy.

FireMath is labeled experimental in Mozilla Add-ons, so you will need to mark the checkbox to get it installed.

Auto Shutdown is a Firefox extension developed by InBasic that monitors your active downloads and will shutdown your computer when they are done.

Actually, Auto Shutdown is much more flexible than that. It can execute any command your enter when downloads are completed, shutting your computer down is just the default (which by the way, I think should be stand by).

It also supports the popular DownThemAll! extension which provides more powerful download management options.

You can get Auto Shutdown from Mozilla Add-ons.

So if you’ve been waiting to see Hello Kitty, Chococat, and other cuties, the wait is over! Get Sanrio.

It adds a snapper icon to the status bar to start screen capturing. You then draw a rectangle over the web page to select the regions you want to capture. You can also resize and move the selection (must activate it through Options). Selections can then be copied to the clipboard, saved as JPEG or PNG files, or automatically saved as you capture them (great for batch capturing).

Note that if using the Anchored mode, where you can resize and move the selection, you have to double click the selection to save or copy it, which may not be obvious for everyone.

For advanced options like full page capture (with scrolling), annotation or timed capture, you may want to look for other options like FireShot. But if you need a quick way to share with others what you have in your screen, this is a great option.

Get Snapper at Mozilla Add-ons.

The theme covers mostly everything: all built-in toolbar icons, sidebars, Add-ons Manager, Library, Options, Download Manager, all with a wink to good old Macintosh look. My only complain is that the buttonization of most icons in the managers results in some too small icons to be recognizable at a glance as they should be.

Get Rein at Mozilla Add-ons.

Weave is now capable of synchronizing preferences in addition to tabs, forms, passwords, history and bookmarks as seen in previous versions.It also improves startup performance, provides a better API for extension developers, and most notably, the ability to automatically log into sites, as initially demonstrated last May.

With autologin, Weave displays a golden key icon in the location bar when it recognizes a site you have already logged in in the past. You can click on the icon to select an identity and press Sign In to access the site, which is no real gain compared to what Firefox already provides. But you can also activate automatic login for the site. Once activated, Weave will fill the form and submit as soon as it recognizes it effectively removing the login step.

Auto login also support OpenID identities, perhaps the most popular and the best chance of getting a unique federated identity management system.

You can get Weave 0.4 at Mozilla Add-ons. More details on Mike Connors blog post.

Available at the equally cool and revamped Mozilla Add-ons.

If you’ve been following Firefox 3.5 development you may realize there was no RC1 as expected. In fact, this is a new approach Mozilla is taking for this stage. As explained by Mike Beltzner, Firefox product director,  basically, the first RC (not as thoroughly tested as a public RC but considered safe)  is offered to beta users only so this large audience (around 900K users) can provide feedback while full QA is done on the build. With beta feedback and QA results a second RC is produced, quickly tested (as changes are minimal) and this one is released to the public, which has been the case. In short, RC1 existed but it didn’t make it for public availability.

There is not much new in this candidate. As expected at this stage, work is mostly polishing. In particular, the Windows themes got some update tab scrolling, tab list and new tab icons to better match Windows’ style.

In Linux, there are new icons for blocked plug-ins, while in Mac, the etch was removed from the Back/Forward keyhole shape introduced in Firefox 3.

Also, as unveiled a few days ago, there’s an update to the Firefox icon to reflect the many changes that have happend since it was modified around Firefox 1.5 release. Below is the new updated icon with a more 3D aspect, and more detail in the firefox’s snout, ears, and hands.

Privacy is a main topic in this release: a new Private Mode (accessible from the Tools menu) has been introduced that lets a user browse knowing that all his tracks (downloads, history, forms, passwords, cookies, etc.) will be cleared as soon as he returns to normal mode or exists Firefox.

It can also be set to be the default mode through the revamped Privacy preferences page in the Options window.

Another big aid for privacy is an option to delete all traces of a web site through the Library or the History sidebar by right-clicking on a web page and clicking on Forget About this Site.

If you prefer to delete tracks based on time (like for the last 4 hours), the Clear private Data option in the Tools menu has been replaced with Clear Recent History, which lets you select what to delete and for what period of time (1, 2, 4 hours, the day or everything).

Users previously concerned with the awesome bar providing too much information through its autocomplete menu, can now disable History and/or Bookmarks suggestions from appearing.

Tabbed browsing gains a new tab button (without losing the classic you can put anywhere in your toolbar), options to drag tabs out of the window to their own, getting them back, true tab cloning. The tab bar is now visible by default making the throbber unnecessary as it is already present in each tab. Plus, you can now restore a recently closed window with all its tabs unlike previous versions.

Performance-wise, this release is significantly faster that Firefox 3 running web applications, thanks to the introduction of TraceMonkey, a technology that allows just in time JavaScript compilation for faster execution. Despite these improvements however, Chrome currently holds the crown for speed with better results in the main JavaScript performance tests, thanks in part to its V8 JavaScript engine.

Places, the history+bookmarks database is now significantly faster due to several improvement to the querying. Web feeds refresh has also been optimized so it won’t hang Firefox if updating several feeds at the same time.

But despite all the good , significant improvements Firefox 3.5 has stacked in the last year of development, it’s its web development oriented enhancements which will make this release most memorable: support for geolocation enabled sites, which means Firefox is now able to tell a site where you are if you agree to do so, for a more customized experience; support for @font-face, a CSS feature that allows embedding of fonts in web pages so visitors get the content as intended; media queries, a blurry name for a cool feature that will allow sites deliver content based on the specific device characteristics such as aspect ratio, resolution, color capabilities, and more; cool 3D and image/font effects thanks to the <canvas> element; and lots of others.

Among these, the most significant is the added support for <audio> and <video> tags, plus the bundle of a Theora/Vorbis (video and audio) decoders, so developers can now create audio and video content for free in these great performing, open source, royalty free codecs that will enable better web video applications as the Flash plugin barrier has a viable option.

This new video option is starting to attract attention, with YouTube making some tests with it, and Dailymotion already announcing the support for the HTML5 video tag and the codec.

Mozilla is running a series of cool examples of what can be done with the new capabilities that Firefox 3.5 will feature at http://hacks.mozilla.org/. It’s definitely worth a look.

For Mozilla, a release candidate means “what will be shipped unless a major bug is discovered”, so if you download RC2 you may as well be using the final version as it would just be renamed.

Firefox 3.5 final is expected by the end of June. The Firefox team is now focused on the next major update, tentatively named 3.6, but more safely called by its code name: Namoroka.

Get Firefox 3.5 RC 2 available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in over 70 languages.

It consists of an icon in the status bar where you can drop links (or favicons from the site button) to create a list of  web pages you want to revisit available from a new sidebar. Yes, it sounds just like bookmarks, but unlike these, it is all kept in a flat list and there’s even an option to automatically clear the links as they are revisited, serving its purpose as a handy link jotter that will help with the bad habit of piling up windows and tabs (hurting performance), your unsorted bookmarks, or both.

Abandoned when Netscape gave up in the browser arena, Tim Luigjes has taken the time to reanimate it so it is now back and ready to try at the revamped and rocking Mozilla Add-ons.

Link Pad also features the original Netscape icon which has little to nothing to do with Firefox’s themes, so some love for the toolbar and status bar button icons would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks to KwiClick, a Firefox extension (compatible with versions up to 3.5 Beta 4) developed by KwiClick, I can now. Select some text, right click and select KwiClick  Search. A floating window will rise with Google search results in a tab, but you can quickly see search results in YouTube, Wikipedia ,Twitter, Facebook and a few others in just a click, all within the floating window, without breaking your browsing flow.

And since you can even play a YouTube video (and rip it) and pin the window so it remains visible at all times, I am now watching an old 1930 video of La Habana, Cuba, as I post this. A keeper for me.

You can get KwiClick from Mozilla Add-ons.

FireNES provides a pretty simple interface to vNES, a Java NES emulator that is automatically downloaded and started from the web. A sidebar provides a comprehensive list of virtually all NES game ROMs available on the web, a popular list, and a list of your favorites for quicker access.

The whole experience is a snap: the Java applet loaded very fast as did all the games I tried. Some of them don’t work but still you can play Super Mario Bros., Legend of Zelda, Double Dragon, Castlevania, and others, in their original forms.

Whether it’s legal or not to use FireNES may depend on your country. At the very least it is a good way to try before you buy some title in the Wii’s Virtual Console Store.

You can do the same thing and more with Close’n forget, a Firefox extension developed by Benoit Bailleux. Select  Close and erase cookies for the current site from the context menu and you will get the same privacy boost described above.

Even further, you can set it to only have pages visited in the current tab to be forgotten and whether to include or not subdomains.

While an item in the tab context menu seems like a more natural place to access this feature to me, Close’n forget is a handy way to get more control over what Firefox knows about you.

Get if from Mozilla Add-ons.

For added flexibility, SK2URL can open the wanted site in a new tab, reuse the current one, or switch to a tab currently open in the same page.

Strangely, it adds an icon to the location bar which I found to be distracting and unnecessary.

While SK2URL’s functionality can be replicated to some degree using bookmark keywords from the location bar, its ability to do so without clutering your bookmarks folders could be of great help for some users.

ShortcutKey2URL is available at Mozilla Add-ons.

So minimal there is no screenshot! Available at Mozilla Add-ons.

Just in case one of your 2009’s resolutions is to get a new Firefox theme, here’s a suggestion: SKY. Created by Andrew Shay, it gives your web browsing a fresh, glassy look you may enjoy.

A plus! version is already in the works (for 3.1 betas only at this time) that adds a glossy toolbar background.

You can get SKY from Mozilla Add-ons.

If having two or three dozens of tabs in your Firefox tab bar is common for you, so is frantic left and right scrolling looking for that specific tab.

Tabhunter, a Firefox extension developed by Eric Promislow, brings some relief with the ability to quickly search tab titles for the one you need. Click on the status bar icon or press the customizable hotkey to open a small search dialog. Enter some keywords and select the result that fits to quickly switch to that tab as the dialog disappears.

For some reason the default Ctrl + Alt + T hotkey didn’t work on my Vista Business install, but changing it to simple F12 did.

I also found it manages to be more noticeable than it should with an unremovable status bar icon and Tools menu item. But with tab search currently out of Firefox 3.1 feature set (it was planned at some point to be available from the awesome bar and/or the tab preview panel), this will ease tab handling for a while.

Tabhunter is available at Mozilla Add-ons.

Firefox 3.1 will bring several new features (most of them pulled back from Firefox 3), along with significant performance, usability, and web standards support improvements.

Let’s see what’s in.

Tabbed Browsing

Tab browsing is getting much attention in this release. While some dramatic changes like the new tab preview or the Ctrl+ Tab switching behavior introduced in Beta 1 have been dropped, there are still some nice enhancements, most of them triggered by the decision to finally make tabbed browsing the default mode.

The tab bar is now always visible and a new tab button has been added to it making tabbed browsing really discoverable for the first time.

Another update to tabbed browsing is the implementation of true tab drag and drop between windows (through tab reparenting instead of just a page reload as in Firefox 3), as well as tab tearing or taking a tab to its own window by simply dragging the tab out of Firefox’s tab bar.

You can also press the Ctrl key while pressing the Reload button to reload the current page in a new tab. While this is coherent with overall Firefox behavior, if you tend to use this mouse and keyboard combination for hard page reloads, prepare to be annoyed a few times.

Performance

Performance-wise, TraceMonkey, the JavaScript optimization technique introduced in Beta 1 has gotten stable enough to be enabled by default in Beta 2, unleashing serious performance improvements.

On my tests it runs the SunSpider benchmark in half the time it takes Firefox 3.0.4. In Dromaeo, Mozilla’s own JavaScript benchmarking, it shaves one third of the total run time.

A change in the way web feeds are updated, now prevents some “mysterious” hang ups that were somewhat common when you had a large number of feeds or lengthy feeds.

A number of query optimizations have improved overall performance of Places, particularly in Linux where some SQLite operations resulted on excessive file system activity due to the way Linux works.

A standard way to declare, create and run web page background processes (like JavaScript code) called web workers, will enable web developers to create more responsive rich internet applications where complex scripts don’t put the whole interface on hold.

Privacy

One of the main concerns with the introduction of the awesome bar in Firefox 3 was that it could accidentally reveal a web site you have visited that you don’t want others to know about. Firefox 3.1 includes options to exclude tags, bookmarks or history items from the awesome bar results that were originally planned for Firefox 3. You can either filter them in using the default operator while typing in the location bar or make it permanent setting a few preferences in about:config.

The most important change, however, is the introduction of Private Browsing mode. In the Tools menu, you select Private Browsing and all pages visited, searches, completed forms, cookies, and download history will be removed when you exit Private Browsing or you exit Firefox (normally or because of a crash).

The only hint right now is the text (Private Browsing) added to the title bar. A better way that balances the need to let the user know he is in private mode, and the need to not tell pass byers you’re doing “private stuff” will be added in the next Firefox version.

Interfaces are provided for extension and theme developers to detect the mode and act accordingly. In fact, Toggle Private Browsing is an extension that already adds a buton to the toolbar to turn private browsing on and off.

If you forgot to enable private browsing, the previous Clear Private Data dialog (via the Tools menu) is now Clear Recent Data which let’s you discard private data for the last 1, 2, 4 or 24 hours.

User Experience

The first change you will notice is during the setup. As announced before, Mozilla has removed the EULA from the setup process. Instead, an information bar will appear on the first launch with a link to about:rights, a new internal page that explains Firefox license and trademarks terms. Firefox now requires only three clicks for typical installation.

A label has been added to the location bar with “Search Bookmarks and History” aimed for new users. The hint is displayed only for new tabs, and when you move the focus to somewhere else, so you won’t see it that often.

Now that the tab bar is always visible by default, the throbber (activity indicator) has become redundant as each tab has its own, so it has now out of the toolbars by default.

Updates are more informative and show how long it will take. Add-on updates (specially large ones) would also benefit of this enhancement.

Support for recent MacBooks’ multitouch trackpads is also available, with gestures for navigating back and forward (three finger left or right swipe), move to the top or the bottom of the page (swipe up and down), zoom (pinch in or out), and swithc tabs (twist clockwise or counter clockwise). With Windows 7 expected to include support for multitouch interfaces sometime in 2010,  good to know Firefox will be ready and awaiting.

Gestures can be customized via about:config.

Links to external resources such as JavaScript files or CSS files are now clickable when viewing a page source code.

A new session restore dialog now lets you select what windows and tabs you want to restore after a crash helping isolate the problematic tab or plugin and prevent.

The Google search icon has been updated to the new blue “g” Google introduced earlier this year.

Library management gets a tad easier with the ability to edit several bookmarks at a time.

Tagging can be faster now with tag autocomplete for bookmarks and history.

Web Content

Several content related improvements have been available since the alphas and previous beta.

• CSS media queries improve developers customization options to deliver content appropriate for the user’s screen size, resolution and color capabilities.
• Query selectors let web programmers more effectively access relative page elements for better applications performance.
• Support for HTML 5 drag and drop specification will also ease this common task.
• Experimental support for CSS transformations and SVG effects for HTML elements dramatically expand the possibilities for web designers with options to rotate, scale, blur, or solarize web elements a matter of a couple of lines.
• Support for embedded fonts (@font-face) will allow users to get the very same font and overall result the web designer intended.
• Cross-site XMLHttpRequests support is back in Firefox 3.1 now that the specification is complete. it will allow AJAX web applications to pull content from other web domains if the server allows it.
• Support for color profiles introduced in Firefox 3 is now enabled by default.

Beta 2 gains 4 more points in the Acid3 test since Beta 1 to 93/100, and a handful of patches still awaits for review that could push the mark to 97 as demonstrated in experimental Windows and Linux builds prepared by Ehsan Akhgari.

Introduced in Beta 1, Geolocation will enable Firefox to pass the current user location (with varying levels of precision) to web sites that ask for it to provide customized content. Geode, a Firefox 3 extension released some time ago, aims to test this feature in advance of Firefox 3.1 release to spot and address possible bugs, and most importantly, privacy concerns.

Beta 2 also expands previously introduced support for <audio> and <video> tags and native support for open and free Ogg Theora and Vorbis video and audio formats with support for .wav streams.

Video objects got a context menu, and videos can be viewed on their own, so Firefox can register itself as a Vorbis and Theora player.

More to come

With a third beta in the horizon there’s still room for some planned features to get in including Windows theme refresh and polishing, tab animations, and better audio/video playback controls are all expected to land soon, along with the usual dose of performance and stability improvements.

A reviewed location bar that would exclude bookmarks tagged as “private”, and will search open tabs has been pulled back from this release.

As usual at this stage in a new release development, most add-ons are not compatible with 3.1 yet, but extension interfaces are frozen with very specific exceptions now, and developers are being encouraged to start updating.

Internally, Mozilla has created a separate branch to continue Firefox 3.1 development, while code for future versions (tentatively, Firefox 3.2) gets checked in to the trunk.

Get Firefox 3.1 Beta 2. Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 release notes.