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Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 doesn't know about:me, but it's fast

By Sean Michael Kerner on November 2, 2009 10:02 AM

From the 'Where Did the Features Go?' files:

The first official Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Beta release is now available, bringing with it a whole bunch of improvements to the open source web browser. It's also (to my naked eye) missing a few features that I had initially expected to see in Firefox 3.6.

Officially the Firefox 3.6 release is being called a minor upgrade and will be made available to all Firefox 3.5.x users.

While it's called minor by Mozilla, in my own limited tests on both Linux and Windows XP SP 3, the Firefox 3.6 browser starts faster than its Firefox 3.5.x predecessor. According to Mozilla, overall JavaScript performance has been improved as well.

On the security front, Firefox 3.6 includes a built-in plugin detection capability to alert users to out-of-date items.

In previous versions of Firefox users could 'theme' there browsers, but with Firefox 3.6 there is integrated support for Firefox Personas which are complete skins for the browser.

Then there are the under the hood improvements like expanded CSS support and support for the the new Web Open Font Format (WOFF) which builds on Firefox 3.5.x earlier work on expanding Font support and options to developers.

Not a bad list of items and certainly the speed improvements of this release make it worthwhile.

That said, it is missing a number of items that I was looking forward to seeing in this release.

Among them is the Taskfox/Ubiquity integration. Ubiquity (renamed Taskfox) is a Mozilla effort to have a command-line type tool for various browser and site actions. At one point it was supposed to be Firefox 3.6, but it's not in the Beta 1 release.

Another (minor) item, I was looking for but didn't find is the about:me command. At one point about:me was supposed to be integrated into Firefox 3.6 but it's not in the Beta (though it is available as an add-on). The idea with about:me is to provide users with a simple command to show them information about their browser usage. A minor feature, but a nifty one that I for one sure hope lands in a future Firefox release.

Minor complaints aside, Firefox 3.6 fixes one big issue that has always bugged me about Firefox tab behavior. In Firefox 3.6 new tabs (when clicked from a link) are opened in the adjacent tab and not in new tab at the far end of the browser. FINALLY.

The tab fix is one that I had hoped for in Firefox 3.5, but didn't make it in, it's great that it's in now. It also clearly gives us all hope that just because a particular feature isn't in one release, doesn't mean we won't see it sooner rather than later.

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