Friday, 12 September 2008

Mozilla Surprises All With Early Release Of Shiretoko Alpha 2

The Mozilla Corporation has released an advance testing version of its popular Firefox Web browser, just days after Google revealed its competing Chrome software.

The Mozilla Corporation has released an advance testing version of its popular Firefox Web browser, just days after Google revealed its competing Chrome software.

According to Mozilla Developer’s blog, Firefox 3.1, code-named Shiretoko Alpha 2, is built on pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 platform, which forms the core of rich Internet applications such as Firefox.

The new build adds in support for HTML 5 video, the ability to drag and drop tabs between different windows and better integration with Microsoft’s Aero interface that is found in Vista.

The new software also adds some speed enhancements to the browser, particularly in the area of JavaScript handling, which was one area Google highlighted as being a strength of the Chrome browser it launched this week, also in testing form.

Mike Shaver, vice president of engineering, noted that Firefox is releasing the next edition of the browser in 3.1 because of the features being included. "We're using 3.1 because we're adding smaller features," Shaver said. "The important part is the end product."

Mozilla is also planning to integrate a faster JavaScript engine, dubbed TraceMonkey, into Firefox. However the organization noted that technology was not included in the software released overnight, although following a set of instructions posted online could test it.

Until the release of Google Chrome, Firefox was considered to be the main competitor of Internet Exploere. In just four years, Firefox has managed to achieve a 19 percent market share and its latest version, Firefox 3.0 had over 8 million unique downloads the day it was released. But now with Google Chrome out in the market and IE 8 just around the corner, Firefox’s battle to lead the browser war might get a little more complicated.

Shiretoko Alpha 2 can be downloaded from Mozilla's Web site by following this link here.