That Happened!

New York - Mozilla, the maker of the popular Firefox internet browser, has released its newest version of the program, Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 and as of now it’s only for developer testing. This version of Firefox is available to use with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux and is available in 54 languages.

A new feature of this version of Firefox is the ability to browse the internet without leaving a public trail of where you were, being called private browsing mode. This is being referred to as the porn mode as most believe that is what users are doing when they do not want their browser history to be seen. However, Mozilla says that they do not believe that to be true and those that are saying it are only looking for attention to their headlines. Mozilla suggest that the private browsing mode would be good to use when shopping for gifts online. Firefox competitors Apple and Microsoft already have this feature in their web browsers.

Another feature of the new Firefox is the ability to clear your history more easily when your private browsing mode is not being used. Also improved speed through TraceMonkey has been added to the new version making it faster to surf sites online that include JavaScript. They also say that the Gecko engine has been improved also.

Also support has improved with the following applications that include HTML for video scripting and elements that contain audio files, W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, CSS 2.1 and 3 properties, SVG transformations and other offline applications.

Last month, Firefox reached 20 percent worldwide market share. This information is based on Net Applications Data. They still have competition from Apple, Google and Microsoft and their internet browsing programs.

Firefox is already looking to develop a newer version called Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 to be available for use in February of 2009.