In what promises to be the most significant update thus far (well, perhaps the mootools 1.11 to 1.2 is still worth mentioning as a milestone), the mootools team have finally released a public beta.

Why is it significant? You can read the blog post but here is the short summary: in addition to being set as the groundwork for the transition to mootools 2.0, here are the most significant changes I have found out about (list will expand as I find out more):

• The introduction of slick (new css pseudo selector engine) – awesome news for DOM manipulation speeds
• Move away from `Native` to `Type` (semantics) – internal change mostly, unless you hack into Natives
• Move away from $names – all things like $chk, $type, $A and so forth are now being renamed to plain function names that make more sense and look more javascript-y.
• Move away from feature detection where possible and a larger reliance on UA parsing instead – not sure I appreciate this as I do not trust UA strings at all, not least of all due to the fact that I often browse with the googlebot UA string when chasing SEO issues around our competitors. There was a nasty post by slicknet a while back in which he ripped into mootools for still using feature detection but I fail to see his point (just as many others do). Both are somewhat unreliable but one does not allow for the user to directly interfere with the framework behaviour.

Additionally, it seems as if the framework has been largely rewritten – most of the source code is totally new to me and it will take me some time to get a better understanding on how it works. Thus far, there’s been no mootools-more 1.3 so I suppose Aaron Newton will be working hard on releasing it soon.

The new documentation is live (courtesy of fakedarren) here: http://mootools.fakedarren.com/docs/core

P.S. Oskar reported earlier via twitter that JS Fiddle has updated and included the beta as framework option so you can play with it.

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