When I had last checked the Mozilla Releases Calendar earlier yesterday, it had showed Firefox 3.1a1 (Shiretoko) wouldn’t be released until ‘Early August’. Well, Mozilla has turn around and already release the first developer’s milestone, Alpha 1. One of the ‘new’ features in Firefox 3.1 is the new tab switching interface (similar to the Control Tab add-on). I am also been reading, it is going to be much easier to remove bookmarks, history and/or tags from the Smart Location Bar (AwesomeBar) results. Firefox 3.1 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering engine.

Firefox 3.1a1 New Features:

• Web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine
• Text API for the <canvas> element
• Support for using border images
  
• Support for JavaScript query selectors
• Several improvements to the Smart Location Bar
• A new tab switching behavior

Suggested Readings:

• Firefox 3.1a1 Release Notes
• The “Firefox 3.1 For Developers” article
• CyberNet News: Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 Download
• Mozilla Links: First step to Firefox 3.1: Alpha 1 is here

Download Shiretoko:

• Windows: Shiretoko Alpha 1 Setup.exe
• Mac OS X: Shiretoko Alpha 1.dmg
• Linux: shiretoko-alpha1.tar.bz2