Firefox 3.6 ready to roll
The Mozilla Foundation will release version 3.6 of the Firefox browser at around 7pm this evening, South African time. The Foundation confirmed on its blog this morning that the newest version of the browser was ready to be rolled out to users. The Foundation also posted a video on YouTube outlining the major features of Firefox 3.6
On the back of the news earlier this week that version 3.7 was to be removed from the release schedule and updates filtered into 3.6, this latest release is a major one ahead of version 4.0. We look at some of the key features added to Firefox 3.6.
Personas
Personas are graphical images – themes – that can be added to Firefox to customise the appearance of the browser. To date personas have been available to users as an add-on. With Firefox 3.6 Personas are built-in and users can choose from a wide range of Personas from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/personas/
Speedup
Mozilla is constantly working on bettering its Javascript performance and now with Google pumping out ever faster versions of its Chrome browser, Firefox is working extra hard. In addition Firefox has also been working on faster startup and shutdown of Firefox, something that is much needed.
Geolocation
Firefox 3.5 introduced the first attempts at adding geolocation support into the browser. This meant that web developers could use standard tools for determining where a user was physically – if they allow it. In Firefox 3.6 geolocation has been improved to return not only an estimated longitude and latitude for a user but also an estimated physical address. Initial testing of this proves to be remarkably accurate.
Orientation
Accelerometers built into laptops and mobile phones are no longer new. But now Firefox has the ability to use these accelerometers to work out which way a PC is facing. Using this ability developers will be able to create mapping applications, for example, that are more location aware than ever.
HTML5
Under the hood Firefox 3.6 includes many of the latest HTML5 capabilities including native video, drag and drop for web applications and CSS gradient support for web developers. The HTML5 “video” tag first introduced in Firefox 3.5, now has new capabilities in Firefox 3.6. One of these is full-screen video viewing. In previous versions of Firefox users could use an add-on to view native videos in full screen mode. With Firefox 3.6 users can simply right-click on a video to view it in full screen mode. The advantage with using the HTML5 video tag is that it embeds the video natively in the page.
Web Open Font Format
The other big change in Firefox 3.6 is the new support for WOFF, or Web Open Font Format. Web Open Font Format is an open standard for including fonts in web pages. Previously a limited set of fonts could be called on in designing web pages. The WOFF standard makes it easier to expand this range of fonts. The WOFF format is compressed and no quality is lost in including fonts in a web page. Although most browsers don’t yet include support for WOFF, with Firefox leading the way it is likely that most will over the coming months. The result will be an expanded range of options for web developers looking to create more attractive web pages.
Firefox 3.6 – comments and views
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