Alex Faaborg, of Firefox UI fame, has posted quite an interesting story on his blog. As you may know Firefox 3.1 will introduce a privacy mode similar to Chrome, Safari and IE, and such a big new changes needs a coat.

But it wouldn't be Mozilla if it would be just a plain copy-and-paste action, therefore more changes are detailed in Alex Faaborg's blog that could be realized in Firefox 3.2 and beyond.

An improved "Clear All History and Data" looks much like the one found in Google's Chrome, and extends on the idea behind "Clear Private Data". Besides selecting what data to delete it also allows a more human way of saying how much out of your history you want to delete by specifying a time range.

New is the "Clear Recent History", which allows you to easily delete portions of your history based on a time range. This way you do not need to constantly alter your "Clear All History and Data" dialog.

Another big change is the Privacy options in the Options window. It's look much more organized, and shares a lot with the "Clear All History and Data" dialog. An important choice is the way you want private data to be stored, where you even have the option to clear it on exit, or always browse in a privacy mode (which stores nothing on disk). Most requested is the ability to configure the location bar to display bookmarks/history as well as which tags to hide.

The privacy mode itself is also displayed as being accessible through the Tools menu. This function will probably work similar to Chrome and Safari, and thus won't store any data while switched to this mode. The power of this feature is that you can temporarily browse in privacy until you resume normal business.

All in all it looks quite nice from the mock-ups and Mozilla is well on their way to keep up and surpass the competition.

Proving that Fennec isn't just vaporware, Mozilla released the first alpha of the killer browser for mobile appliances, well, only the Nokia N810 for now.

Mozilla Fennec's first debut is purely for the goal of allowing everyone to preview this developer's release. It surely isn't ready for use yet in production ready devices, but it looks like Mozilla does have a nice card in their hands.

This first alpha release is available for the OS2008 ("Maemo") software platforms that runs on the Nokia N810 internet tablets. While probably most of us don't have such a device you can still experiment with Fennec, provide feedback, write add-ons, and get involved by installing a version of Fennec for your desktop PC powered by Windows, Linux or Mac.

This release supports: bookmark (including tags), the smart URL bar ("awesome bar"), tabbed browsing with thumbnail images, integrated web search (built into the URL bar), and more. Also quite handy is auto-hiding controls and URL bar and the ability to zoom in and out. Also don't forget the password manager, a pop-up blocker and easy access to clear your private data.

As you can see Fennec supports a lot of Firefox 3's features already, making this early preview already a daring competitor for Opera Mobile on internet tablets. Let's hope Mozilla, and partners, will work on getting this release on more than just the Nokia N810, or it won't make much of a change in the current market.

Mozilla has released the first beta of Firefox 3.1 which is, as the version number implies, a not-so-big new release.

The final release is scheduled for the first quarter of next year, so only a few months are left and most of the changes we see today are what we'll see then, except for one major part: privacy browsing. Due to the popularity of the privacy browsing feature - which is available in Internet Explorer 8, Safari 3 and Chrome - Mozilla decided to add this unplanned feature in 3.1, but it hasn't materialized yet.

So what is included in this release? The Gecko engine received updates to improve support for web standards, as well as support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 properties. Concerning cutting edge videos, Firefox 3.1 now supports the <video> and <audio> elements (also shown in Opera Labs builds), as well as the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, web worker threads, SVG transforms and offline applications.

In the areas of tabbed browsing their is now a new tab-switching shortcut that shows thumbnails of the tab you’re switching to (which is also available in Opera through the preferences). Similar to Internet Explorer and Chrome, Firefox 3.1 shows the tab bar even when only one tab is open. It also has a new "+" button to add tabs, though it's not placed next to the tabs, but at the end of the tab bar.

You might be thinking, hey, where's TraceMonkey? Well, it's in there, but not yet enabled by default. The plan remains to get it finished before final release, but you can manually set javascript.options.jit.content in about:config to true and restart the browser.

You can try this new release, but be sure that some bugs may arise and extensions be broken.

... or not. With Google as a new contender in the browser market and taking the fourth spot from Opera already, according to some statistics, one may think the future looks bad for the small Norwegian company.

In this episode of myth busters we try to debunk this myth that although competition is increasing in the desktop and mobile browser market, Opera Software is far away from gone and away.

Desktop
This month Google came out of the nothingness with their years rumoured web browser. Chrome introduced several new aspects, which actually were already shown by Microsoft in Internet Explorer. With several sites stating that Chrome has already taken the fourth spot, after Safari, Firefox and IE, one would conclude Opera is at the brink of extinction. However if one looks closer at the statistics, as much as you can trust them, Opera has actually not lost anything. Chrome has mostly taken IE's market share.

Logical? Yes. Looking at Chrome you'll notice it's much more like Safari and Firefox than Opera. Chrome introduces from a technical point lots of interesting things, but from a user experience it's actually quite poor. It's a basic browser with basic features like tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, and a password manager. The most advanced features are the "most visited" start page and private browsing. Most of these features were already displayed in other browser, and without advanced extensibility like Firefox it's actually a limited browser like Safari.

Opera on the other hand is an advanced, all-in-one, program. Opera Software is still focused in the same areas, as they've always been, in performance and small footprint. This approach is completely different than Chrome, where multi-processing costs more resources. Whether Opera Software will take this route in the future remains to be seen, as for for the mobile market this doesn't seem like a good approach with limited system resources. It's unlikely that Opera users would switch to Chrome, as it's a really big step back, feature wise.

In the area of JavaScript performance Opera seems to be lacking currently. Kestrel can't compete enough with the benchmarks used by Chrome's V8, Firefox' TraceMonkey or Safari's SFX. However none of these browsers is finished and none of them will see a final release this year. Opera 9.6 seems to be heading for a final release this year, and Peregrine (Opera 10) will be the next step. With Opera Software being one of the few closed source companies they aren't open on their next steps, thus it will remain a mystery for now if some new or optimized JavaScript engine is coming.

What can be confirmed is that out of all currently released browsers, Opera is the most ACID3 compliant out there. With a labs build for a perfect 100 score Opera is still one with the best record in standards support.

Mobile
The biggest competitor to Opera is Safari, however this browser is limited to Apple devices only, which don't seem to hold a large share of the market world wide. Opera has been swift and did a great job in bringing Opera 9.5 for Windows Mobile out. With the HTC Touch, Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, and many more smart phones based on Windows Mobile, they've been marked as the favored browser.

Mozilla's own mobile browser, Fennic, is not yet finished and thus has not been featured on any mobile phone yet. The Google Android platform is only now featured by T-Mobile and includes the WebKit engine. But if this platform will really take off is simply a wait and see, as it has to compare with Symbian OS, Windows Mobile and Apple's iPhone OS.

For now Opera seems to be going strong on the mobile market, as they've coupled the development to the desktop release, and even sport similar looks. Not forgetting Opera Mini which runs on most phones out there, as a free alternative. This last little man has no real competition.

Myth debunked
So in fact Google Chrome's entrance to the market has not changed a thing for Opera. For competition and standards compliance this development is a good thing. Being a completely different browser, Opera seems not to be affected by the increased competition. Only on the mobile market Opera has to be really sharp in market development to keep the competition out.

Mozilla has released the second maintenance release of Firefox 3. This is a recommended update for all users, as it fixes several security and stability related issues.

Of the security relates fixes, two are deemed critical and are related to a crash due to memory corruption and privilege escalation via XPCnativeWrapper pollution. Two moderate issues are related to resource: traversal vulnerabilities
and BOM characters stripped from JavaScript before execution.

Besides this there are minor layout fixes for several sites, theme fixes for right-to-left languages, new EV root certificates and more.

If you use Firefox you can easily update by selecting Help -> Check for Updates... if it's not displayed at start-up. You can also download the entire package from the Firefox download page.

Update: Only several days later Mozilla released Firefox 3.0.3 which contains one bug fix where users were unable to retrieve saved passwords or save new passwords.

The fine folks at WebKit did something special. TraceMonkey from Mozilla and V8 from Google could have given them a mental beating, but it seems they used this to set aflame their own desire to make the fastest JavaScript engine.

With SquirrelFish out first in the WebKit nightlies several months ago, it seemed like a race was started by the coders at Apple (and friends) to get much richer and necessarily faster web applications powered by JavaScript. The Mozillians joined the race first, by bring TraceMonkey to the Firefox 3.1 nightlies, and claiming the crown in most, if not all, areas. Then came the newcomer, Google, who used part of WebKit for rendering, but plugged in their own JavaScript engine, V8. Although V8 wasn't a clear winner, it did beat all exciting browsers and was in fair competition with TraceMonkey. But now the WebKit team proves you can't ignore them... meet the extreme.

SquirrelFish Extreme is the new JavaScript engine for WebKit and continues where SquirrelFish started. There are now four key components which are responsible for it's speed: bytecode optimizations, polymorphic inline cache, context threaded JIT and regular expression JIT.

So it sounds all technical ey, but how much faster is faster? At the Summer of JavaScriptCore benchmarks appeared using SunSpider and the results are staggering. SquirrelFish Extreme clocks in at 943 ms, Google Chrome's V8 at 1280 ms, Mozilla Firefox 3.1's TraceMonkey at 1464 ms and lastly Opera at 6394 ms.

Well, these numbers show great potential in these three browsers, surely Google must be scratching their head performance wise, though V8 is also specifically tasked for multi-processing. Nonetheless it's a good thing we have competition between these big (small) three, as you can already see they all improve.

However one can only be disappointed that the browser so often touted as the fastest is the slowest, as there are no numbers of Internet Explorer 8.

Firefox 3 already received some major improvements in JavaScript execution time with the use of profiling. But today the good developers of Firefox landed a new Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler that even further boosts the performance by ±2-22 times.

Although disabled by default in the latest Firefox 3.1 nightlies, due to stability problems at the moment, this new trace-based JIT compiler really pushes Firefox 3.1 on par with Safari's latest Squirrelfish. Of course as a competitor, the new JIT compilers needs a fitting name thus it was dubbed TraceMonkey.

So what kind of performance differences are we talking about? Apple's SunSpider increased in the total test result by a factor of 1.83, and when focusing on SunSpider ubench suite, TraceMonkey achieves a factor of 22x increase.

If you want to know more about this technology I suggest you to read Andreas Gal's extensive blog post. Firefox 3.1 will be a sweet release, no doubt.

Mozilla, which advertises itself as the leading company for the future of the web, has introduced a new series on Mozilla Labs. A concept series, inviting anyone interested to think outside the box and share ideas.

First and foremost it's important that these ideas do not have to be what Firefox 4 or Thunderbird 3 is going to be. The idea behind these series is to think of concepts for the future of the web. So think outside of the box and think on how you would like to experience the web itself in the future. How will the social aspect play a larger role, what about security, other non-PC devices and human input through touch, etc.

To get things started Mozilla Labs has posted some concepts of Aurora, which introduces a new way of interaction between people on the web and managing bookmarks and history on a new more intuitive way.

Go take a look and don't be shy to share your ideas, under the Creative Commons license or the Mozilla Public License, with all the others!