What’s new in Firefox 3.6 beta?

Web browsers frequently update their releases to perform better than the competition. Mozilla Firefox is one of the best when it comes to giving a quality milestone build. I checked out the latest beta version (Firefox 3.6b4) so we could learn about the features that will be coming soon.

The first eye catching feature is its support for the web Open Font Format or WOFF. In Firefox 3.5 they included support for linking to TrueType and OpenType fonts.

Over these two popular font formats, WOFF has two main advantages: it is compressed so it will load quickly and it contains meta information that allows developers to see where the font came from. In theory, this will open up a wider range of font options for web designers.

The beta version also has improved handling of embedded native videos using the <video> tag. Users will be able to right click any supported video and click “Full Screen” to view the video in full screen.

The other new features focus on performance improvements. Now it can handle multiple JavaScript scripts running asynchronously. It also starts quicker and the overall responsiveness is faster perhaps due to the improved JavaScript engine.

Other new features in this release of Firefox include the follow:

Support for the new HTML5 markup language
Support for lightweight themes
Support for hiding the menu bar automatically
Built-in support for Personas (change theme with one click)

With more than 140 bug fixes this should be a more stable release than the current 3.5 version. As an added stability feature, it will alert users of out of date plugins. There is also a change on how extensions are integrated to prevent crashes due to bad code.

To try the latest Firefox 3.6 Beta, get the installer from www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-beta.html.