Feeling adventurous? If so, you can try out the release candidate of the upcoming new version of FireFox, 3.6. The 7.7 MB download will give you a taste of what’s to come in this version, and we’re talking about some very interesting changes. I am using 3.6 on my Ubuntu 9.10 box right now. It runs slightly faster on my aged P-4 3.0 GHz box, the old box is a good test for low end laptop useage.
FireFox 3.6 runs on the well-tested Gecko 1.9.2 web-rendering platform, bringing support for new web technologies, better speed, stability, faster start-up and load times, as well as improved Javascript performance.
As far as new features go, perhaps the most interesting one is 'Personas', which lets users change the appearance of the browser with one click. Furthermore, the new Firefox will alert you when your plugins are out of date, and, finally, it’s optimized for small device operating systems, for example Windows CE and Maemo.
See the release notes for Firefox 3.6 RC1 here, and download it here. The latest version of FireFox is 3.5.7, upgrade if you are not at the least revision, there are some important security updates in there.
Additionally it looks like FireFox 3.7 has died off in favor of smaller updates with a shorter update time frame. These updates will come automatically, bypassing one major problem, users not doing timely security updates. The feature changes should be small in nature.
I just updated my Thunderbird browser to version 3.0, and have to say the changes were major and took some time to get used to. I doubt most users would be too happy with the upgrade, at least at first.
For users programs that are now deemed critical, I think the slower upgrade of features may be far more desirable than dumping entirely new versions out.
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