Firefox 3.1 Planned Features Draft Announced

With Firefox 3.0 barely out the door, the Mozilla Corporation is already working on Firefox 3.1

The release would be branched off the Mozilla2 platform and would use ActionMonkey, Mozilla’s JavaScript engine SpiderMonkey and the Adobe Tamarin which was open sourced by Adobe back in 2006.

The release would also see the following features introduced, some of which, didn’t manage to make it into Firefox 3.0:

• Support for the as defined in the HTML 5 specification. Chris Double
  has been working on this for about a year now and there are even a few
  experimental Firefox builds featuring it with native Theora (Ogg)
  support. Whether or not a certain codec must be part of the
  specification was the subject of a lengthy discussion last year. Sadly,
  one of the reasons to oppose Theora as a mandatory codec is the fear of
  a submarine patent that could make browser vendors vulnerable to a
  patent lawsuit.
• Support for cross-site XMLHttpRequests (XHR) which would allow more
  powerful web applications and an easier way to implement mashup.
  Support for cross site XHR was pulled out of Firefox 3 code due to ate
  changes to the specification.
• More power for Firefox 3’s location bar. Mike Beltzner, Firefox 3 lead, talked recently about how the search and location bars could be merged.
  In an intuitive way. SeaMonkey -and the Mozilla suite before- already
  does this but the implementation is not the most discoverable.
• More performance tuning, better system integration.
• Native JSON DOM binding, a powerful feature for web developers.

3.1 has been code named Shiretoko – a Japanese national park in the same way Firefox 3.0 was code named Gran Paradiso, a mountain range in the Italian Alps and Firefox 2.0 was code named Bon Echo, a Canadian National Park.

Feedback is always welcomed to the discussion.

Firefox 3.1 (Shiretoko) planned features draft – Mozilla Links