Firefox 3 wasn't rolled out very long ago at all, but its first public milestone is just 'round the bend. Mozilla is expecting the code freeze for alpha 1 of Firefox 3.1 (code named Shiretoko, a place in Hokkaidō, Japan) to push out next Monday, with public beta testing to arrive July 25.

A status meeting today confirmed Beta 1 is due in August, while Beta 2 will ship out September. The final upgrade should be out by the year's end or the first quarter of 2009.

As for features, that's still up in the air:

“We’re not at a point where these sort of decisions are being made,” said Mike Beltzner [to ZDNet], Firefox project lead. “As you heard at today’s meeting, we’re currently working towards shipping a first developer milestone (Alpha 1) to get broader feedback on the work that we’ve been doing to date. Until we’ve shipped that first milestone, though, the future is still too hazy.”

Nevertheless, "sources" are listing off several items:

• video support defined by HTML 5
• cross-site XMLHttpRequests support (for building stronger web apps and easier implementation of mashups)
• tag autocomplete
• bulk tagging support
• private browsing mode for corporate users
• advanced search UI
• lightweight tagging user interface
• integration of a browser’s download history