Tebyte

Never rest on its laurels is the motto of a good software developer? A few weeks after leaving the last major version of its Web browser, Firefox 3.0, the Mozilla Foundation has put online a first draft public what will be his successor, Firefox 3.1, code-named Shiretoko. This version is absolutely not intended to end users, and should therefore be used only for test, insofar as the optimal functioning is not guaranteed.

The first alpha can rapidly discover some new features or technical characteristics of the future Firefox 3.1, starting with the integration of version 1.9.1 of the Gecko rendering engine. The compatibility with HTML 5 and CSS 3.0 is also improved, with better management of the tag “canvas” or borders image style sheets, not to mention the care of selectors jQuery.

The most visible improvement is probably at the behaviour of “smart bar, which can now use Boolean operators so as to restrict the scope of a search. Recall that the navigation bar of Firefox 3 makes it possible to view Web addresses drawn in the browsing history or bookmarks based on simple keywords, as a research tool.