A second beta for the Firefox 3.1 browser from the Mozilla Foundation was made available for testers late Monday. Among the new features, we can find a new private browsing mode, which removes traces of web sessions users want to keep private, a faster JavaScript engine, called TraceMonkey and more support for emerging web standards. This version is available for Windows, Macintosh and Linux in more than 50 languages. Codenamed Shiretoko, the first beta of Firefox 3.1 debuted in October, showing improvements in its Gecko Web-page layout rendering engine and adding support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3.

Furthermore, the beta added tab-switching previews, similar to those in the Opera web browser, but these were removed in beta 2 by popular demand. Another tab improvement is the ability to drag a tab from one browser window into another. As for the Private Browsing Mode, if users forget to turn on this feature, they can still remove browsing history or remove all traces of a Web site. Firefox 3.1's Gecko 1.9.1. page layout engine has been speed up and it's also giving Web developers the ability to perform background JavaScript operations so that pages won't be slowed by time-consuming calculations.

Another improvement that the beta brings is called the Geolocation JavaScript API, which lets a web page query the browser's location. This way, the browser can load maps, give directions or attach location information. Firefox 3.1 beta 2's score on the Acid3 web standards test has improved to 93 out of 100. The beta can be downloaded from Mozilla's official page. Firefox accounted for 20.8% of all browsers used during November, marking the first time that the browser broke the 20% barrier for an entire month, so it seems the final 3.1 version will bring Mozilla even more success.