'Klaatu barada nikto!'

About the same time as I upgraded Coredump to Wordpress 2.7, I also got the Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 update.

I haven't gotten around to trying out all the new features, but they look promising. Well, some may seem old news if you're already using Google Chrome, but they're good news nevertheless.

First off, the Beta 2 update now has "Private Browsing" mode -- history is not recorded: searches, downloads, cookies, nada. Great for pron, er, secure banking.

Tabs can also be torn away from windows and transferred to other Firefox windows effortlessly. The Smart Location Bar just got smarter with smart keywords, keyword matching and restriction, and other operators. You can now also play =.ogg= files natively without any plugins. (Get ready to be rickrolled! Heh.)

TraceMonkey adds native compilation to the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine. (Lots of camel-case words there, whew!) Still not sure how it's usable for me, as a user, but it would be fun to test out for developers out there.

The new Firefox also employs the emerging Web Workers draft standard for moving expensive computations off the web page and onto a separate background thread. The worker passes messages back to the browser page as JSON.

And, oh, the tab-switching thing they did with beta 1: it's gone. It was cool, though, but apparently it got voted out by the community.

Of course, this is still beta, but hey, that's what makes it more fun.