Firefox 3.6, Real Soon Now

FireFox 3.6 RC1 The Next Version, Is Now Available.

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.

Firefox 3 Is Here

Download here, be part of history.

Firefox 3 Release Candidate

Mozilla has released the first Firefox 3 RC. It should be all polished up and ready to go, which is the way Mozilla does it. So time to give it a go if you are so inclined. I have been using Firefox 3 since the first beta and it is abig improvement over Firefox 2. Especially with memory handling, the leaks appear to have ben banished, and the stability is good as ever. Other improvements are the PGO ( performance guided optimizations) so far only for Windows machine, and the vastly improved JAvaScript speeds.

The big story from the users perspective is the new 'Places', the integrated history and bookmarks manager interface powered by SQLite, a small open source database engine that provides much more robust querying capabilities. With Places you are able to search your history, tags and bookmarks with a fully fledged search interface. You can select where to search, what to search and then save the search as a 'Smart Bookmark' that updates as your personal web grows and changes. Places becomes a central area for bookmarks, browsing history and downloads all in one spot with thumbnails and tagging -- All designed to help you organize your little piece of the web. Places makes it easier to deal with huge numbers of bookmarks by adding one-click bookmarking, tagging, annotations, and intelligent searching through your history right in the url location bar, and it seems to work. Once you get the hang of it, very cool. But it may take some time to understand and make use of all the new goodies.

Tagging is another new big feature, tagging is tightly related with Places and some of the changes made to the location bar: click on an empty star icon in the location bar to save the current page as a bookmark. Click it again and you can specify a folder to save the bookmark to, create a new one and add tags you can later search on. The Tags are used like personalized search key words.

There are many changes to the location bar, autocomplete works on web addresses but also looks into bookmark and history page titles and tags which make it more comprehensive. The searching function features adaptive learning so as you use the feature it learns how you may be using it and what you are looking for. Personalized.

The rest is mostly new gingerbreard, themes and such, but the stability, speed and memory reduction will be noticed by anyone with an older resource limited machine. Others can load it up and use the max, but personally I find a lot of the gingerbread distracting and prefer to keep it lean and simple.

Get yours here. Note that this isn’t the final Firefox 3 and there may still be some ugly hidden bugs that could mess with your data. Unlikely, but that’s why it is called a release candidate.

A plug for scrapbook extension -- If you do research on the web, one of the most annoying things is the content you use may disappear from the web, leaving you with a blank stare. One way to avoid this is to use a Firefox extension called 'scrapbook'. It is invaluable, because scrapbook stores the target page locally on your computer, so if the content disappears, at least you have a local archived copy. Get it here at the author's site, or from the Firefox extensions section of Mozilla's website..

Firefox 3 Beta 5

Mozilla has made the fifth beta version of its upcoming Firefox 3 browser available for download today, and is freezing code for release candidate 1 in only six days.

Trailblazers can get Beta 5 here and the release notes here.

UPDATE: Installed Firefox 3 B5 on my main browsing box, and I have got to say, best yet. Far more stable, fast. Some of the extensions don't yet work with B5 so that prevents it from full time use for me, right now. Did I say it was fast, it's fast. My main browser box is a 3.0 PIV so the speed is very useful. I have other much faster machines used for software development, but for browsing they would be just a waste of cycles.

Going to experiment with some of the new things and see how they suit me.