Mozilla testing near-final Firefox 3.5
Published: 01 Jun 2009 09:08 BST
Mozilla is close to releasing of its near-final version of Firefox 3.5, but the updated browser was not quite ready in time for a planned day of widespread testing.
Earlier this month, Mozilla set Friday 29 May to be Firefox 3.5 RC1 Test Day. But RC1, the first release candidate designed to be more stable than the earlier Firefox beta versions, was not finished for the occasion.
"Even though RC1 hasn't been released yet, the test day will still go on with the latest nightlies [nightly builds of Firefox based on the latest source code] which are practically RC1 minus some minor uplifts," said Aakash Desai of Mozilla's quality assurance team on Thursday. Mozilla has set up the 'Litmus' testing programme to encourage broad testing of its software.
RC1 is expected in a few weeks, spokeswoman Melissa Shapiro said on Friday, although one developer told ZDNet UK's sister site, CNET News.com, that he hoped it would arrive in less than two.
The new version of Firefox began as version 3.1, a modest update. But a gradually expanding feature list led Mozilla to rename it 3.5 and release it months later than had been initially planned. In the meantime, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8, Apple released a beta of Safari 4, and Google has released a rolling series of upgrades to its new Chrome browser.
Among the changes compared with the current Firefox 3.0.x versions are:
- The faster TraceMonkey engine for running websites's JavaScript programs
- Support for tags to describe audio and video content the way images have been available for years
- The private-browsing mode for leaving no traces on your computer while surfing
- Support for geolocation technology to let permitted applications know the user's location
- Built-in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) technology for exchanging data between servers and browsers
- Support for the Web Workers standard for letting a browser perform processing in the background without holding back a web application's user interface
Credit: Mozilla testing near-final Firefox 3.5 from CNET News
Did you find this article useful?
13 out of 17 people found this useful
Digg
Slashdot
Del.ici.ous
Stumble
Reddit
