I have to admit, I’ve gotten more and more comfortable with using Chrome as my everyday browser while at home.  There are however a few key features in Firefox that I’ve grown extremely accustomed to which I have indeed been missing.  So, of course, word of FF 3.1 Beta 1 coming out was enough for me to drop Chrome for a while and come back home so to speak.

One thing that took me a few minutes to figure out was the “new tab” button missing off the toolbar.  I usually add it on manually and have grown accustomed to using it fairly regularly, even though I know I should be using the ctrl+t keyboard shortcut.  Don’t bother, that option is gone from your toolbar icons.  replacing it is a permanent spot over on the right side of the tabs.  The “+” obviously opens new tabs and the little arrow next to it allows you to skip to any open tab as well.

From a GUI point of view, one of the cool new features in FF3.1B is the ctrl+tab 3D feature to cycle through open tabs, which is sort of similar the alt+tab feature in Windows which cycles through open programs, and maybe even more similar to the cascading desktop feature in Vista.

FF 3.1 beta uses the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine which is most of the reason it’s so much faster than the current version of FF3 and more on par with Chrome for its Javascript rendering speed.

For whatever reason though, this feature comes disabled by default.  It’s fairly simple to turn on in three easy steps.

1. Type about:config in your browser’s address bar.
2. Type or paste javascript.options.jit.content into the filter.
3. Double-click the preference to set the boolean to true.

FF3.1B will also be introducing geolocation awareness which is something you could get with FF3 but not without an additional plugin.  3.1 will have it baked right into the main product.

You can download and test drive a copy here.  Beware though, it will brick all of your plugins.  I’m sure those will be fixed soon enough and for now it’s nice to see an even faster version of FF rolling out with brand new features to boot.

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