Posted 10/15/08 at 04:15:04 PM by Alex Castle

The first Firefox 3.1 beta has been made available for download, bringing with it a number of cool new features. However, possibly the coolest of those features, the lightning-fast TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, is disabled by default. Fortunately, it’s a quick fix to turn it on, and Seth Rosenblatt at CNET explains how:

“To activate it, type "about:config" into the Smart Bar, then type "javascript.options.jit.content" into the filter. Double-click on the preference listed to change the boolean setting from "false" to "true." Close the window and you should notice an immediate improvement to the JavaScript rendering speed.”

He used the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark test to demonstrate the improvements in the new engine, which completed the test in 2788 milliseconds, compared to 5447 ms for Firefox 3.0.3. Always the skeptics, we tried the benchmark ourselves, and witnessed an even more dramatic improvement.  For us, speed more than doubled, from 4725 ms to 2227 ms.

So if you’re trying out the 3.1 beta, enable the TraceMonkey engine and see what it can do for you. Share your experiences after the jump.

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Posted 10/15/08 at 07:14:05 AM by Pulkit Chandna

The first beta of Firefox 3.1 has arrived after being delayed by about a month. This beta release introduces the ability to switch between tabs using the Ctrl-Tab combination (3d tab switching). The tab-switching feature has been available in form of an extension till now.

Users can also drag and drop tabs between different Firefox windows. The beta release also has geolocation capability – currently available as an add-on - built into it. Geolocation allows users to interact with the web based on their geographic location.

The inbuilt geolocation feature in Firefox 3.1 and Geode – the geolocation extension - are slightly dissimilar. The difference lies in the fact that the former offers users a choice between GPS-based tracking and WiFi-based tracking, whereas Geode only counts on WiFi for tracking the location of a user.

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