Submitted by After a number of delays, Mozilla today released version 3.6 of the successful Firefox web browser. It brings with it numerous improvements and new features, and of course speed improvements are welcomed, too.
Apart from user-visible changes, there are also a number of things in Firefox 3.6 that should help developers. From the release notes:
- 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- Protection from out-of-date plugins to keep users safer as they browse.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.
“Firefox 3.6 is another well executed release for Mozilla,” writes Ryan Paul over at Ars Technica, “It builds on the improvements that arrived in 3.5 and adds some value for users and developers. Although it’s not a particularly feature-heavy release, the general increase in responsiveness, JavaScript performance, and developer functionality make it a win for casual users, Internet enthusiasts, and Web programmers.”
You can get Firefox 3.6 from the download page.
I like the new theme engine and how I can actually install themes now without restating the browser. I wish it also handled the <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_bar“>titlebar.
Edited 2010-01-21 23:17 UTC
The link looks all peachy keen when I preview but when I post it goes to pieces on me.
That’s because you can’t read.
“LEAVE SPACES around URLs to autoparse. No more than 8000 characters are allowed.”
No, he typed the HTML—his link does not match the link-text, see. There’s a bug with HTML parsing that munges the link like that. It doesn’t happen with preview because that’s done by JavaScript and not parsed by the server.
I think it’s: browser responsiveness
On the surface, not much. I have been using version 3.6 since its first release candidate, and it is closer to its predecessor than any new version of Firefox I have used. Under the hood, you tend to get text loading consistently before images, and the tab you are focused on before those in the background. In general, 3.6 gives the impression of being faster. I understand that it supports some of the newer HTML standards better.
There also is a new tab preview feature that, while not as good as the Tabscope extension, is good enough. Apparently, it causes trouble with Windows 7, so it’s disabled by default. Changing “browser.allTabs.previews” to true will put a button on the tab line that you can click on to preview your tabs. Changing “browser.ctrlTab.previews” to true will produce the same previews with a Ctrl-Tab keystroke.
I tend to behave badly toward my browsers. If there is no update to an extension when I want to upgrade, I edit the install.rdf file of the extension I want to keep, and soldier on. You should, of course, never do this.
So far, the old extensions and even my themes transitioned fine.
All in all, it’s the kind of upgrade I like: Lots of improvements under the hood, and very little disruption.
I totally agree on this point. Firefox 3 gave us the so-called “awesome” bar which forced me to start compiling a long list of bookmarks just for it to work as expected, and a major annoyance in the way the Back/Forward buttons work when right-clicking them (which still confuses and annoys me to this day). If I right-click the Back button, I should get a list of the pages I visited before the one I’m on–not a confusing list of those plus the ones I was at after the current one.
This update seems to be just small but useful updates; no “WTF?” type changes. I’m about to try it out in wine, and might update my main version to 3.6.
Edit: Just tried it. I’m surprised there’s no separate “Personas” section of the add-ons window. Instead, they’re all lumped in the “Themes” section with all the traditional themes. Weird… I’m sure people who have a collection of regular themes and personas will eventually see the downfalls of this…
Edited 2010-01-22 09:34 UTC
Why do you need a long list of bookmarks to make awesomebar behave like you want? I have several websites which I visit regularly that are not bookmarked, and after using awesomebar for a few times it lists those sites on top. Isn’t that the behavior you want?
extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6b at false is better than editing the extensions
Now CSS gradients are available to Firefox, Safari and Chrome users. I hope to see use of them go up, less images to download is always a good thing.
Feels slightly faster, actually, pages that I usually load for 2-3 seconds are now available for 1 seconds. Good, this includes osnews.com as well
Every release has speed improvements. Yet, perhaps I am imagining things, but my browser experience today is generally slower than the days of Firefox 1.0 – they cram so much into a browser that despite all the performance improvements, the Web 2.0 experience requires a multi-Ghz machine with multi-Gb RAM to do things that a well designed desktop app connecting to a remote server could do a decade ago.
Oh what we sacrifice in the name of convenience. *sigh*
I think it’s that sites have become heavier, not browsers. Tons of flash, images, ads, etc.
What does Firefox 3.6 do compared to Firefox 1.0:
– Phishing and malware Protection: more memory and about 30MB of storage
– Session restore: more memory and about 1MB of storage
– Spellcheck: practically free
– better addon manager: practically free
– better web support including things like SVG: practically free
– awesomebar: more memory and about 5MB of storage
These are a few of the new features that were added to Firefox after version 1.0. Firefox uses more memory because it does more but it certainly isn´t bogged down. My guess is that you mistake the dramatic increase of website complexity with Firefox bloat. If I load Gmail, Greader and Netvibes I am already in the 250+MB range and the loading of those pages reaches 10 seconds after a reboot. This of course also happens with Google Chrome and Opera.
Between Firefox 1.0 and 3.6 Mozilla have fixed a massive number of memory leaks and bloat, as well as implemented a new memory manager (jmalloc) and Firefox 3.0 was shown to be the best browser for low-memory usage over time. If anything, the increase of memory used is because the increase of bloat in websites has outpaced Mozilla’s improvements!
For me, this is the best release of Firefox in a long time.
Over the last year or so, I’ve been tending toward the other browsers – Chrome, Safari, Opera, due to big speed improvements in those browsers (especially Chrome, which I was using most).
But with Chrome, it’s a little sparse feature-wise, and it’s appearance is really primitive.
But with Firefox 3.6, speed has been greatly improved, in terms of both launch time and page rendering. Also, memory usage has been reduced, and it’s been made more robust in handling plug-ins. And the new Tracemonkey Javascript engine is great (and fast).
To add to the under the hood improvements, I really like the new Personas. It’s really very nice to have over 33,000 LnF’s just a click away, and with it not being bloated.
And of course, Firefox Add-ons are second to none. Everyone who uses Firefox has their favorites, and those favs become difficult to do without when using other browsers. For me, it’s ReminderFox, MinimizeToTray, and the eMusic toolbar.
Finally, Firefox, for me, has been the best all-around browser for rendering myriad websites. It seems Firefox can handle anything (whether it’s bad web development, IE6 style sites, or just bloated flash stuff, or even elegant CSS/DHTML).
With the big speed improvements, and lessened memory usage, Firefox 3.6 is near on par with Chrome, but with a much richer feature set and a much more attractive environment.
Now I’m back to Firefox as my everyday browser.
These are halcyon days for Browsers – Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari – they’re all in a race, and constantly leapfrogging each other, for the benefit of end users.
Then there’s poor, pathetic IE – in spite of big improvements, it’s woefully behind the others, and a big security nightmare. It’s a wonder anybody uses it anymore, and a wonder MS hasn’t trashed it and started anew.
Love it too
but the persona’s don’t seem to be working for me. Maybe because I’m on xpize, I don’t know…
Finally, Firefox, for me, has been the best all-around browser for rendering myriad websites. It seems Firefox can handle anything
Firefox is really good, but their is actually a second reason. Webdevelopers used to have IE as their primary development browser (you had to and their wasn’t much else at the time of IE5.x and early IE6). We all know what that caused.
Now Firefox has the webdeveloper-toolbar and especially Firebug add-on and it’s cousins, which a lot of webdevelopers use. Firefox 3.5/3.6 has the largest market share. So the webdeveloper knows what a page will look like for the visitor. Also the organisation behind Firefox is really commited to developing a browser that follows all the standards.
Also no sane webdeveloper wants to use IE anymore other then testing things and seeing things fail. Every webdeveloper has a lot of hate for IE.
What is even worse, no webdeveloper understands (other then slow market convergence) why anyone wants to use IE.
IE is slow, very buggy, less secure and the company developing it, doesn’t really want fix or develop it.
It is constantly trying to balance between 2 things, not to lose market share on the desktop-apps to the web-apps and on the other side not have IE loose to much market share in the browser-department.
generally in favour, but…
– french/german spellcheckers fail
– google gears fail !
oh well
Tom UK
I like the personas feature, really cool except for the thick border under the toolbar/tab bar!
From Betanews.com:
http://www.betanews.com/article/Firefox-36-RTM-officially-released-…
* browser.ctrlTab.previews needs to be set to True to turn on the Ctrl+Tab functionality. This lets you preview thumbnails of all your open tabs, and select the one you want by its picture — similar to the way you use Alt+Tab to shift between tasks in Windows.
* browser.allTabs.previews needs to be set to True to add a button to the right side of Firefox’s tabs bar, the effect of which is the same as Ctrl+Tab: You click on this button to see the thumbnail previews.
* browser.taskbar.previews.enable needs to be set to True to give Firefox the ability to send those thumbnail previews to the Windows 7 taskbar. When you hover over the Firefox icon in that taskbar, you can choose your tabs from the thumbnail list that pops up. This feature only works in Windows 7, of course.
I’ve tried these and I like it!
Edited 2010-01-23 10:15 UTC
at least for me. I typically have > 50 tabs open at a time, and 3.5 was just getting really bogged down and had slow response times just to switch tabs. And there was some kind of bug where if I left it running for more than 12 hours or so it would start hogging 100% of one of my cpu cores, apparently not doing anything.
It had gotten so bad, that i was starting to launch chrome instead, even though it has serious usability issues with the number of tabs i tend to have open at one time.
FF3.6 has officially fixed it, for me at least.
The browser seems as responsive as Chrome was, which is to say that I can’t feel any lag when using it.
The only issue I’m having now is the new tab behavior which tries to insert new tabs next to the current one. I tried getting used to that for a few days, but it’s just terrible for the way i browse. An easy about:config change, though, and it’s working for me again.
Edited 2010-01-24 02:58 UTC