With the relase of Mozilla Firefox 3.6, developers have a reason to be excited. Expanded support for emerging web standards, a PluginCheck utility and Personas make this release worth the download.
This new release offers support for CSS, DOM and HTML 5 technologies, as well as for full-screen video and the open-source Web Open Font Format (WOFF). Mozilla increased Firefox’ overall performance, including reducing its startup time. In this release,. JavaScript executes approximately 12% faster, with some pages loading up to 20% faster. Developers can also use asynchronous script loading, which should give users the impression that Firefox 3.6 is quicker overall.
The Persona features provides support for lightweight theming to Firefox, and enables users to apply a custom style to the browser, including toolbars, menus, tabs, and status bar. Persona has been described as “a decal that you can apply to the top layer” rather than a traditional Firefox theme.
The new PluginCheck utility provides security for the user, protecting users from security vulnerabilities and ensuring that they benefit from the latest bug fixes, pretty much automatically. It blocks vulnerable plug-ins from loading, and provides users with the information oh how to update the software, right at their fingertips.
Firefox 3.6 is available for Microsoft Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems in 65 languages, and current users can update to the latest release by selecting “Check for Updates” via the “Help” menu.
