Firefox 6 (and 7) are raring to go

When the Mozilla Foundation said back in April 2011 that it was to speed up Firefox development, it clearly wasn’t joking. The foundation released Firefox 5 just a few weeks ago, version 6 is already in beta, and Firefox 7 is under development in the new Aurora channel.

With the release cycle for new Firefox versions sped up significantly, each new version of the browser is incrementally better than its predecessor. So, if we want to make sense of where Firefox is heading, it is more useful to talk about how Firefox 7 will shape up than simply look at Firefox 6.

There are a number of features that will be introduced in either Firefox 6 or 7, the most interesting of which are:

Panorama changes

In Firefox 4 and 5 users were given the option to group tabs together into logical groups using the Panorama feature. It was a nice feature that added a new layer to managing multiple sets of favourite sites, but often added to system overheads when opening Firefox for the first time. Firefox 6 and 7 will allow users to start up Firefox without loading these groups on start-up. For users that already have large numbers of tab groups this could be a significant saving when starting up.

Site-specific settings

As users spend increasing amounts of time online it also becomes harder to manage what information is shared with sites. Firefox 6 adds a new window which makes it simpler to manage individual permissions for sites. So, for example, users can set which sites can store cookies on their PC or which ones can use stored passwords.

Memory usage

Firefox 7 is also expected to slim down its memory usage. The current development version of Firefox 7 reportedly shows reductions of up to 50% in memory usage. Officially, Mozilla says that Firefox 7 is likely to use around 30% less memory hungry than previous versions. Either way, that bodes well for users.

Better synchronisation

With Firefox now available on mobile phones as well as on desktop PCs, the need for decent synchronisation is significant. Firefox 7 will include a new version of its synchronisation software which will synchronise passwords and bookmarks almost instantaneously between different copies of Firefox.

More developer tools

Firefox 6 will also go out of its way to help developers using the platform. From Firefox 6 there will be a web developer menu available which will include common debugging tools but also a new scratchpad. The scratchpad will make it easier for developers to build and test Javascript tools directly in the browser. There will also be changes to the console which developers will have more control over, including being able to run it in a separate window.

The Firefox 6 beta version and the Firefox 7 Aurora version can be downloaded from Mozilla’s developer site.