New Firefox beta offers dramatic speed increase

Mozilla just released the next-generation of Firefox into testing, complete with location-sensing, and an all-new Java engine to make the browser faster than Google Chrome.

Firefox 3.1 beta 1 is still too unstable for the general public, but shows where the browser is heading, with the company’s new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine outperforming even Google’s best efforts.

There’s also code to make Firefox compliant with the W3C Geolocation Specification. That means it can sense its location, using a laptop’s GPS or Wi-Fi signal to figure out where it is.

As well as all the back-end improvements, Mozilla’s tweaked Firefox’s restart process, so you can finally choose which tabs to re-open when the browser is loaded up after a crash, or abrupt exit, rather than opening them all, or none at all.

All this, and Firefox mobile in early testing too? The browser wars have never been more heated!

TBC | £free | Mozilla

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