Firefox 3.6 due this month; next comes 'Lorentz'

From CNET News.com: Mozilla hopes to release the final version of Firefox 3.6 later this month and a stability-improving update code-named Lorentz by March as part of a revised updating strategy.

Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, said Tuesday that he's pleased so far with his scrutiny of test data from the more than 1 million people using the first release candidate of Firefox 3.6, which came out late last week.

"So far we haven't found showstoppers," he said. If no more major issues are uncovered, "we're looking at releasing somewhere in last two weeks of January," he said.

The most visible change with Firefox 3.6 is Personas, a mechanism to customize the browser's appearance with artwork, sports team logos, movie imagery, and other graphics. It had been available as a plug-in. Another change blocks third-party software from encroaching on Firefox's file system turf to increase stability. Support for a technology called the Web Open Font Format means many non-English browser users should have a faster time loading Web pages with downloadable fonts.

And perhaps most significantly given the competitive threat from Google Chrome, the new version is designed to launch and load pages faster, offer a more responsive user interface, and run Web-based JavaScript programs about 20 percent faster than the current Firefox 3.5, Mozilla said.

Under the hood, Firefox 3.6 gets support for the File interface, which can help with tasks such as uploading multiple photos and is part of the draft HTML5 standard effort. Another deeper change is running scripts asynchronously, which can help load a Web page faster by putting off some work until the high-priority chores are complete. Google and Facebook are among the sites taking advantage of the asynchronous feature, which requires Web developers support but isn't hard to add, Beltzner said.

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