It’s taken a while to get drrssed, but the latest 3.6 version of Firefox has finally rocked into town.
Promising nippier performance, natty one-click themes, safer add-ons and plug-ins, improved font handling and other life enhancing properties the browser is now ready for your downloading pleasure.
Built on Mozilla’s Gecko 1.9.2 web rendering platform – under development since early 2009 – the latest version of the open source browser contains improvements for web developers, add-on developers and regular punters, and is claimed to be faster and more responsive than previous versions .
Here’s the big changes listed below, but if all those words are too much for you, scroll down to watch the dude with the loud golfing jumper tell you what’s what:
- 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- Protection from out-of-date plugins to keep users safer as they browse.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.
If you crave more info, check out the 3.6 release notes or grab the free Windows, Mac, and Linux downloads from here: Firefox web browser.
Best put your sunglasses on for some of these themes. My eyes!
It is noticeably faster, not quite Chrome fast but fast enough to keep me using FF as my default (although once Chrome gets extensions it’s bye bye FF!). Not too keen on the persona thing, they seem to obscure the bookmarks in the toolbar too much…
Nice, I love Firefox, and this versions even better.
My Firefox has been crashing a fair bit, but I’m hoping this latest version will be more stable, otherwise I’m off to Chrome land. The themes are horrible though and look really amateurish IMO.