Mozilla has released Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 for the Firefox fans and has taken yet another step towards the final release. You can download the beta from here.

Here are our impressions of the Beta on a Windows machine. First impression is that it is really fast! Our very own Techtree.com page loaded in less than 2 seconds which takes more than 4 on any other browser (results may differ on various Internet connections). This is due thanks to the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine that uses tracing optimization for snazzy performance delivery. TraceMonkey makes this release faster than Google Chrome's V8 as claimed earlier. Note however that the engine is not turned on by default and needs a bit of elbow grease to get it going. Needless to say though, Mozilla developers are planning to further optimize the engine.

To activate the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, type "about:config" into the address bar. Then type "javascript.options.jit.content" into the filter. Toggle the boolean setting from "false" to "true". Close the window and restart the browser.

We found an almost 50 percent boost in the browser speed, after making that tweak.

Mozilla has also implemented W3C Geolocation Specification as mentioned on Geode release. We couldn't make Geode 1.5 work but Ubiquity 0.1.1 worked smoothly for us.

The most interesting feature included is a 3D-like tab switching interface that shows a preview of a tab's content. Press CTRL+Tab to trigger this tab switching interface. Keep them pressed to see how fast the browser rotates the tabs. Hey, it's fun...

On testing the browser for Acid Test3, it gave us impressive score of 88 out of 100. This beta will also include support for OGG video and audio format as reported earlier. Apart from that use of special characters in the address bar for specific and restricted search has also been implemented.

However, two necessary features -- private browsing mode and session restore weren't available with this release. Several features planned for Firefox 3.1 will be implemented in the beta testing phase by the Mozilla developers.

For more details on Firefox 3.1 beta 1 release, check out the release notes.