The third beta of Mozilla’s open source Firefox 3.6 browser is now adding fixing 83 bugs and adding several new features.
Of the 83 bugs fixed, 13 have been tagged as being critical. It looks to me like the majority of those critical flaws are crash related items.
One particularly interesting critical bug fix is one for the crash reporter itself. According to Mozilla”.., the updater crashes when trying to update with crash reporter open.”
One of the key goals overall for the Firefox 3.6 release is to increase performance. To that end, there is at least one new feature in Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 that will help to support that goal. From a technical perspective, Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 now implements the async attribute of script elements. Basically its a way run scripts asynchronously to improve overall page load times.
Another new change is the component directory lock-down for add-ons.
“In addition to the standard mechanism for extending the browser via
add-ons and plugins, though, there has historically been another way to
do it,” Mozilla developer Johnathan Nightingale wrote. “Third-party applications installed on your machine would
sometimes try extend Firefox by just adding their own code directly to
the “components” directory, where much of Firefox’s own code is stored.”
That’s a problem for a number of potential stability and security reasons, but it’s a problem that is being eliminated with Firefox 3.6 Beta 3.