Final preparations under way for Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 public rollout

The rollout of what's still being called Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 is now under way, although Mozilla's official announcement to the general public is still forthcoming. In the meantime, the organization has been actively calling upon its contributors to give one final round of tests, for what it's calling a worldwide test day.

The official rollout is expected today. Though developers didn't have time to comb through the code for this beta just to change digits, last week Mozilla announced a change of heart about its nomenclature. So this latest public beta, which will give them the first chance to spin the tires of Mozilla's new TraceMonkey JavaScript interpreter, will actually be a test of Firefox 3.5.

In a change we've already noticed to Private Browsing mode (unveiled in a previous beta), starting Private Browsing immediately hides the browser window from which the mode was launched. So if, for instance, a user happened upon a page that inspired him to enter private browsing mode for a minute or two, that particular page would be invisible to the world (and to him as well) for the duration of the private session. Once the user ends private browsing mode, the hidden page and its associated window reappears.

Another new feature that will be of interest to Web services developers is native support in "version 3.1" for JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), a way to represent complex data objects -- where multiple tiers or properties of a record would normally be represented by as many separate JavaScript instructions -- in a single collective function. Up to now, JSON parsing in Firefox was possible through the addition of the JSONView extension; but native support enables Web services developers to comfortably rely upon a baseline level of support within their browser of choice. Native JSON parsing is also being planned for Internet Explorer 8.