There's a brand new Firefox in town: Firefox 3.6. It's not a huge update, but it does offer improved performance and stability together with some interesting new features.
One of the most important changes is improved support for HTML5, the next generation of the language in which the web is written.
That enables two particularly eye-catching things: the ability to watch streaming video without installing a plug-in, and support for the HTML5 File API, which means developers can use dragging and dropping between browser and desktop.
PLUG-IN HELP: Firefox will now tell you if plug-ins are out of date, reducing your potential exposure to some security threats.
With video, Mozilla's timing couldn't be better: YouTube and Vimeo have both announced HTML5 video players that dispense with the need for Adobe's Flash. Unfortunately neither player currently works with Firefox 3.6.
That's because of a schism in the HTML5 world, with Mozilla plumping for the open source Ogg Theora codec and other browsers supporting H.264 encoding instead. Google's Chrome supports both, but YouTube doesn't - and that, plus widespread H.264 support elsewhere, means that H.264 already looks like the winner in this particular format war.
What else is new? There's built-in support for Personas, which enables you to choose from tens of thousands of unpleasant browser themes. That's maybe a bit unfair on Windows, where Personas look pretty nifty, but on the Mac they're consistently hideous.
CHANGE YOUR LOOK: Personas - themes - are now built in, enabling you to preview new Personas with a single click. Some are more successful than others
More usefully there's support for the WOFF web font format, which enables print-style typography online. The browser now checks whether your plug-ins are out of date and warns you accordingly, which can help reduce the risk of browser-based exploits. And if you've got a laptop or tablet computer with an accelerometer in it you control the browser by tilting your PC.
If you're paying really close attention you'll also notice that when you open a new tab it appears next to the current one, not to the right of every other open tab. It might be a little change but it makes things much less confusing when you've got tens of tabs open at once.
How does it perform?
Last but not least there's performance, and this is the fastest Firefox yet. The JavaScript engine is faster than in Firefox 3.5. But while it's not as fast as Chrome you'd expect this: Google's various applications make heavy use of JavaScript, and the search giant has tuned its browser accordingly.
It is, however, closer to Chrome's performance than ever before. In the Sunspider benchmarks Firefox did the tests in an average of 1730ms, compared to 930ms for Chrome. That's more than four times faster than IE8, which wheezed through the same benchmarks in 8436ms.
JavaScript performance isn't the only thing that's been tweaked though. Before, every tab was given equal prominence, but now the tab in focus - the one you're currently looking at - gets the lion's share of system resources, which will make it render more quickly.
The browser also supports asynchronous scripts, which means web designers can essentially say "this script isn't that important; render the rest of the page first and then come back to it." Both changes should mean speedier real-world browsing.
Overall, then, this is a worthwhile upgrade. It's not revolutionary, but it delivers a host of improvements in speed, stability and support for emerging standards. It might not be pretty, but it's pretty damn good.
YEP, IT'S CHROME: While YouTube supports HTML5 - shown here - it doesn't support Firefox's chosen format, Ogg Theora
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Your comments (5) Click to add a new comment
chisayne
January 29th 2010
5. @nitrofan - I've been using Firefox since the early beta days of Windows 7, and haven't noticed any such performance issues. It sounds more likely there is some malware or other issue on your system than any incompatibility between FF and Win7.
Make sure all your firefox addins/plugins are up to date, maybe try running without addins and see if it's more stable, then turn them on one-by-one to see if you can find the culprit. Run a scan with a reputable malware scanner and I'm sure you'll see improvement.
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smith03
January 27th 2010
4. I am using firefox from past 1 year,its really awesome.The version is really cool,faster and flexible as compared to other browsers
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nitrofan
January 25th 2010
3. I have been a huge Firefox fan for the last three years, BUT since installing Windows 7 my Firefox installation has become a complete nightmare, crashing every 10 minutes regular as clockwork so I hope 3.6 will be a bit more stable.
If anyone from Mozilla reads this PLEASE PLEASE sort this out ASAP, I don't like IE8 and Chrome has some major short comings compared to the Fox.
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joetke
January 24th 2010
2. I've upgraded from 3.5 version and I've got all my bookmarks erased and the procedures to recovering firefox team ask me to follow, 1st, seem obsolete (something like how to recover bookmarks from firefox 2.x), 2nd, even rebuilding bookmarks from backups in Json doesn't work at all. I just have a gray window when clicking on setting.
I really wonder whether this version is a relative leap toward a better responsive browser or just a source of nasty troubles that I came across.
Well, I noted that the front page is rendered very quickly and realized an effective improvement of javascript runs which I use heavily in my web applications. But that doesn't stand as a consolation for me.
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tech89
January 22nd 2010
1. Firefox needs to create something pretty good for their next update. Until that happens I'll stick to Chrome.
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