Friday, October 17, 2008

Firefox 3.1 Released

Google has been letting people create profiles for a while now — you can see mine here, and you can create yours here. Until today, your public profile that you created has remained hidden from search engines.

When Google released Chrome, Firefox could finally pick on a kid that was the same size. 

Yesterday Mozilla announced that Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 was available for download. This brings with it a whole new raft of features and improvements:

·          Web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine

·          Added support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 properties

·          A new tab-switching shortcut that shows previews of the tab you’re switching to

·          Improved control over the Smart Location Bar using special characters to restrict your search

·          Support for new web technologies such as the

The new tab-switching feature is really neat (press CTRL+TAB to get a view of all the open tabs), and the special character support for the Awesome Bar makes life a lot easier (for example, you can restrict the search to your history by typing ^, or search only bookmarks using *, or tagged pages with+, if you want to match only text in the URL type @, and for title and tags only use #). Immediately we get usability gains without chrome overload or bloat. Nice.


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