The first official Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Beta release is now available, bringing with it a whole bunch of improvements to the open source web browser. It’s also (to my naked eye) missing a few features that I had initially expected to see in Firefox 3.6.
Officially the Firefox 3.6 release is being called a minor upgrade and will be made available to all Firefox 3.5.x users.
While it’s called minor by Mozilla, in my own limited tests on both Linux and Windows XP SP 3, the Firefox 3.6 browser starts faster than its Firefox 3.5.x predecessor. According to Mozilla, overall JavaScript performance has been improved as well.
On the security front, Firefox 3.6 includes a built-in plugin detection capability to alert users to out-of-date items.
In previous versions of Firefox users could ‘theme’ there browsers, but with Firefox 3.6 there is integrated support for Firefox Personas which are complete skins for the browser.
Then there are the under the hood improvements like expanded CSS support and support for the the new Web Open Font Format (WOFF) which builds on Firefox 3.5.x earlier work on expanding Font support and options to developers.
Not a bad list of items and certainly the speed improvements of this release make it worthwhile.
That said, it is missing a number of items that I was looking forward to seeing in this release.
