Firefox 3.1 Due August 19

Mozilla has announced it will make a beta of the new Firefox 3.1 on August 19 — but that date is flexible.

Firefox 3.0 is barely, and very successfully, out of the blocks when Mozilla has announced it will release of beta of the new Firefox 3.1, ZDNet reports. It’s set August 19 as the release date, although the organization has added that the date is flexible.

So what will 3.1 contain? According to a posted wiki, there will be browser support for HTML 5, meaning Firefox will be able to work with audio and video html tags, as well as support for the Ogg Vorbis audio codec and the Ogg Theora video codec.

Developer Chris Double wrote in his blog:

"The backend has been committed to the main Mozilla source code and is enabled by default. This original commit is a work in progress. There are unimplemented bits, bugs, etc that need to be sorted out. But it’s a start towards using a common codec across all platforms and will improve as we get towards the 3.1 release."

Firefox 3 set a world record on its release in June with over eight million downloads in the first 24 hours.

Mozilla has also released the first plans for its next generation browser, called Aurora, and is asking for input from Internet users. It’s also working on a mobile version of Firefox.