Greetings to all of our great community testers – you are our most valuable resource. We now have *Firefox 3.1 Beta 3* available for testing. Note that this build is a beta and is intended for pre-release testing. We would like your help in testing the release and identifying any possible regressions or issues.

*_What to Test/Where to Get Builds_:*

(Note: If you are riding the “beta” channel, you can manually check for updates and update to this build). Otherwise you will have to download from the directory below.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

Please hammer on these builds mercilessly to make sure that things work well! If you notice things that worked in Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 and do not work in this release, we would like to know about it right away.

_*Read the Release Notes*_
*Please also make sure to read the Release Notes which detail the known issues: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.1b3/releasenotes/

***_How to Report Feedback_:*
(1) File a bug in *https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/. *Note in the comment if it is a regression from a previous release. Things to remember when filing a bug:
(a) Always include the Build ID that you tested on. If you type about: in the URL bar, this will give you the Build ID.
(b) Always include clear Steps to Reproduce the bug
(c) Always check to see if your bug has already been filed. This link will help: http://tinyurl.com/2465be
(d) Use the regression keyword if it indeed a regression from a previous release.
(e) If you happen to crash, please include the Breakpad ID in the bug. You can get this by typing about:crashes in the URL bar.

(2) If you don’t wish to file a bug, report issues through http://feedback.mozilla.org or through the mozilla.feedback.firefox.prerelease newsgroup (also available on Google Groups). However, we prefer bugs as feedback is easier to track.

Thanks in advance to all of you for helping test Firefox and making it the browser of choice for millions of people all over the world! We are getting ever closer to the final release and thank you for your participation.

marcia, on behalf of
Team Mozilla QA

Mozilla have announced that the forth beta version (due for release 14th April) of the next instalment of popular browser Firefox will skip a few versions from 3.1 to 3.5.

Firefox director Mike Beltzner announced on the developer news blog that due to the inclusion of many new features (TraceMonkey, Private Browsing , etc not to mention the number of bug fixes already added to Firefox 3.1 ment that an increase in version number to reflect the changes was required.

Further updates for us Add-On developers is to be announced in due course via the wiki, and probably the mailing list too.

for more information, visit these sites:

• mozilla developer news
• mozilla developer wiki
• the register

I have been playing with the IE8 betas since BETA1 was realeased all those months ago and i have to admit the RC1 is actually quite good, the progress in the browser since the first beta was releases is very good. When i quickly browsed the net and viewed my sites in B1 they were all over the place, broken css and javascript errors glaor. Now with RC1 freshly installed the majority of sites seem work fine without having to resort to the awkward compliants mode ( switch back to IE7 mode ) they have bolted on for all the lazy designers/programmers who built IE only versions fo websites. I am acually quite excited about the release of Internet Explorer 8 as it marks the start of a new generation of websites that are standards compliant from the go, without horrid IE hacks that a lot of sites seem to use.

Again the hopefully imminent release of Firefox 3.1 as got me excited, not only do we finally get the P0RN mode we have been waiting for we also start to get some CSS3 functionality we can use, most notably the use of web fonts, no more can will we be stuck with the handful of web fonts we have used for so long but with the quick upload of a public font we will be away with great typography and great looking websites.

There are a host of new features coming in FF3.1 and im not going to go through them all but i still think its the best browser you could possible choose to use but here are links to both so you can choose

• Download Mozilla Firefox 3.1
• Download Internet Explorer 8

Firefox 3.1 allows us to use the CSS3 rule @font-face, allowing us to specify a font not necessarily installed on a visitors system. The rule alerts the visiting browser a non-standard font is required and is given a location it can download the font into the temp files to display the website as intended.

Syntax

@font-face {
  font-family: <a-remote-font-name>;
  src: <uri>;
}

Example

  <style type="text/css" media="screen, print">
    @font-face {
      font-family: "Bitstream Vera Serif Bold";
      src: url("http://developer.mozilla.org/@api/deki/files/2934/=VeraSeBd.ttf");
    }

    body { font-family: "Bitstream Vera Serif Bold", serif }
  </style>

More details on this can be found over at the Mozilla Dev site , they have also publised a list for developers with all the features being added to 3.1