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Browser Battle: Firefox 3.1 vs. Chrome vs. IE 8

Mozilla’s second alpha of Firefox 3.1 is upping the ante in the next-generation browser battle. So how do the main contenders stack up so far now? One thing’s for sure, the Firefox team has taken note of Google’s recent Chrome release and worked hard to make sure its offering can hold its own.

Mozilla had already claimed its 3.1 version could outperform Chrome when it comes to speed (and most independent tests show it at least tying). Now, the engineers have incorporated Chrome-initiated options such as the ability to drag and drop tabs in and out of browser windows. The second alpha release also adds support for the HTML 5 video tag, which gives Web developers expanded options for embedding video within a page. Don’t forget, too, that Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 — released at the end of August and quickly eclipsed by Chrome’s introduction — is also vying for a piece of the pie.

Here’s a breakdown of the high and lowlights of each offering and where it stands as far as a full release.

Windows beta released September 2. Mac OS X and Linux versions still under development and said to be coming soon. No indication of targeted full release date.

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Firefox blunder could give Chrome the edge

Mozilla has admitted to losing months of valuable user data when a member of staff accidentally formatted a server.

When using Firefox users can report any websites that fail to render correctly using the “Report Broken Web Site” option in the menu. This data is used by Mozilla to improve and refine the application.

“Well, any sites reported as broken in the last three months? Yeah… you might want to report it again,” suggests Mozilla engineer Mark Smith on his personal blog.

During the extremely busy Firefox 3 launch day, which brought many Mozilla servers to their knees, the reporting tool

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