Firefox 3.1 “Shiretoko” beta 2 has been released to the public. Some of the biggest things to look forward to are (quoth MDC):

  • A new Private Browsing Mode that allows you to browse without Firefox storing any traces of where you’ve been – perfect for online holiday shopping!
  • New functions that make it easy to remove the history of your past few hours of browsing, or remove all traces of a website.
  • New support for web worker threads.
  • The new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine is now on by default for web content.
  • Removed the new tab-switching & preview behavior based on feedback from Beta 1 users
  • Support for new web technologies such as the <video> and <audio> elements, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, CSS 2.1 and 3 properties, SVG transforms and offline applications.

The improved history delete functions will probably render the Close’n forget extension for Firefox unnecessary. I like this one better than the extension.

Honestly, the removal of the tab-switching & preview behavior was kinda well-anticipated. I even wrote a post quickly showing how to disable it in alpha 1.

Developers, check out this post with more in-depth info about the new web features (TraceMonkey, HTML5, improved CSS support and more) included in Shiretoko beta 2.

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