Mozilla Releases Second Firefox 3.1 alpha

Not satisfied with Firefox 3.0.1?  Want to see if Firefox 3.1 is really faster than Chrome, as Mozilla claims (though it's arguable)?  Well, last night Mozille released the second alpha for Firefox 3.1.  Note the word "alpha.:"  Beta is buggy enough, but Alpha starts to stretch the limits a little.

Shiretoko Alpha 2 is an early developer milestone for the next version of Firefox that is being built on top of Mozilla's Gecko 1.9.1 layout engine, Shiretoko Alpha 2 is being made available for testing purposes only, and is intended for web application developers and our testing community. Current users of Mozilla Firefox should not use Shiretoko Alpha 2.

Yes, they are indeed warning you away from this release, if you are not a developer.  That doesn't mean geeks and bleeding edge users (meaning, early adopters) can't try it, but they are giving as much warning as they can without putting up a big stop sign.

Mozilla says the following about new features in this release:

Shiretoko / Gecko 1.9.1 Alpha 2 introduces several new features:

    * Support for the HTML 5 <video> element
    * Initial support for web worker threads
    * You can now drag and drop tabs between browser windows
    * Ability to make use of Aero "Glass" in XUL
    * Support for CSS 2.1 properties: ::before and ::after, and white-space:pre-line
    * Support for CSS 3 properties: -moz-border-image, word-wrap: break-word, text-shadow, box-shadow and column-rule
    * Performance improvements and new preference values for color management profile support

Some of the changes will affect web and platform compatibility.

BTW, although the faster Javascript engine, called TraceMonkey, is one of the highly touted features-to-be in Firefox 3.1, it was noted that the changes were not integrated into the Alpha 2 build.  If you want to try it, though, you can use a nightly build, and turn on the functionality via instructions here.