I usually stay away from BETA software because I do not want my computer or the software to be crashing on me while I am using it. However, I am more daring when it comes to BETA web browsers because they are able to load up websites slightly faster compared to the older versions. My computer is currently running Internet Explorer 8 RC1 and also just updated my Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 to the latest Beta 3.
Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 was released early December and I am sure everyone has been having problems viewing the emails in Hotmail Inbox. When I click Inbox or any other folders on the left pane, the bottom left will show a yellow “Loading…” message box and it remains like that. Clicking on any messages in my Inbox is inaccessible too. It is a known bug and I’ve tried searching for a workaround but couldn’t find any. The only way I could check my Hotmail is by using Internet Explorer.
After 3 months of waiting, thankfully the latest Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 fixed this problem and I can now log in to my Hotmail to view the emails using Firefox 3.1! You can try it too because Firefox developers consider this release to be “stable”.
Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 9 months. Firefox 3.1 is an incremental release on the previous version with significant changes to improve web compatibility, performance, and ease of use:
This beta is now available in 64 languages. Improved the new Private Browsing Mode. Improvements to web worker thread support. Improved performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. New native JSON support. Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering. Support for new web technologies such as the |video| and |audio| elements, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, CSS 2.1 and 3 properties, SVG transforms and offline applications.
If you’re thinking of being adventurous in trying out the latest Firefox 3.1 Beta 3, please take note that there will be add-ons incompatibility problems and Firefox will prevent you from using it unless the plugin has proven compatible. You can check out this article on how to enable firefox incompatible add-ons.