Please note: Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, web compatibility, and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this beta.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 is now available for download. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3.1. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3.1 can be followed at the Firefox 3.1 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #shiretoko.

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

• Improved the new Private Browsing Mode, including the ability to “Forget This Site” from the History sidebar.
• Improved performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• Improvements to web worker thread support.
• New native JSON support.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as the <video> and <audio> elements, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, CSS 2.1 and 3 properties, SVG transforms and offline applications.

Source: Mozilla Developer News

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What’s Next?

For starters, Beta 3 was suppose to be the end of version 3.1 numbering scheme. However, the latest nightly I just installed (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1b4pre) Gecko/20090312 Firefox/3.0.3 ID:20090312054420) still has the old 3.1 numbering scheme (and disabled about 2/3 of my add-ons). Interesting though is Mozilla Release Page shows the next version as Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 and a release date of mid April. Well, that is a whole lot sooner than the nearly 3 1/2 months between Beta 2 and Beta 3. So if that release date holds true and there is not a Beta 5 (like there was for Firefox 3) and they get everything wrapped up in two Release Candidate (RC) builds then may be we could be looking at a release sometime in June. June 17th was when Firefox 3 was released which was a year and half from the release of the first Alpha build.