On Thursday, Mozilla released version 3.6 of their web browser, Firefox. While the last major release of Firefox was 3.5, and this would seem to be a relatively minor revision, it actually has a significant number of changes and improvements.
For one, the Mozilla team said that the Firefox 3.6 release is 20 percent faster than the six month old 3.5 release. Firefox continues to chase down Safari and Chrome, which, at least according to certain tests, are faster.
Speed, speed, speed is what developers of browsers, except for Microsoft. They are perhaps the slowest browser of all, with Chrome the fastest, but they are not interested in a speed race.
The release notes for Firefox 3.6 follow:
- Support for a new type of theme called Personas, which allow users to change Firefox's appearance with a single click.
- Protection from out-of-date plugins to keep users safer as they browse.
- Open, native video can now be displayed full screen and supports poster frames.
- Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness, and startup time.
- The ability for web developers to indicate that scripts should run asynchronously to speed up page load times.
- Continued support for downloadable web fonts using the new WOFF font format.
- Support for new CSS attributes such as gradients, background sizing, and pointer events.
- Support for new DOM and HTML5 specifications including the Drag & Drop API and the File API, which allow for more interactive web pages.
- Changes to how third-party software can integrate with Firefox in order to prevent crashes.
What Firefox has been experiencing of late, has been instability. There are numerous complaints online on crashes in the browser. This has forced some users to bolt, particularly with the opening up of Chrome's extensions.
Written by Michael Santo
HULIQ.com
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