Mozilla Releases Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2

daria42 writes with news that Mozilla has released the second alpha build for Firefox 3.1, codenamed "Shiretoko." The new build includes "support for the HTML 5 <video> element" and the ability to "drag and drop tabs between browser windows." ComputerWorld is running a related story about benchmarks shown by Mozilla's Brendan Eich which indicate that Firefox 3.1 will run Javascript faster than Chrome.

Comments

We ain't dead yet!

[mcrbids]

So here we have the Moz FF team saying: "We ain't dead yet!".

With IE as the undisputed champion, nothing happened. FF brought the "browser war" back, and suddenly IE starts getting new features.

Google's Chrome brings the browser war to a white heat - suddenly FF is being given a run for its money as the undisputed browser feature champion!

Here's what I'd like to see:

1) Process-per-tab. It sucks when some JS in some tab gets hung up, bringing everything else in the browser to its knees! Chrome is the only game in town here.

2) Fast (native-speed) JS execution. (Chrome? FF?)

3) Excellent plugin compatibility. Both FF and IE have this down.

4) Cross Platform support. I'm a Win/Mac/Linux guy, I expect my software to work equally on all three. FF is the clear winner here.

4) Ubiquity. For me, this is FF, because it's the first thing I download after a fresh OS install, regardless of the OS. But for most people, this is still IE.

What am I going to use? Firefox has my money, still. I type this in Chrome, but I usually am not using Windows, so Chrome, Safari, and IE are non-starters for me.

But Chrome makes it obvious: the browser is the next O/S.