Mozilla released the first public beta of the world famous Firefox browser, codenamed Shiretoko. This first beta aimed at the developers and testers is loaded with new features and goodies. A lot of bugs that we saw with the alpha release of Shiretoko were addressed and resolved.

According to Mozilla, the main features introduced with this release include:

• Web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine
• Added support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 properties
• A new tab-switching shortcut that shows previews of the tab you’re switching to
• Improved control over the Smart Location Bar using special characters to restrict your search
• Support for new web technologies such as the <video> and <audio> elements, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, web worker threads, SVG transforms and offline applications.

Its available for download on all major operating systems (includes Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) in over 36 different languages. Even though Mozilla has asked us not to provide a direct download link (instead they asked us to link to the announcement instead), we will still share the link to the download page with you, in case you are in a hurry and don’t want to go through the release notes.

Download Firefox 3.1