The Firefox Beta was just released for version 3.6. Lots of improvements, most notably:
From Mozilla
- Users can now change their browser’s appearance with a single click, with built in support for Personas.
- Firefox 3.6 will alert users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
- Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster frames.
- Support for the WOFF font format.
- Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.
- Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.
Personal Notes
- Mac version now has smooth scrolling.
- Simpler pages (text and images) seem to load faster than Safari 4. No benchmarks to back this up yet.
- Application seems more responsive overall.
- Still notably absent is native cocoa and keychain support.
- Faster start up, even from a cold start.
Remember, this release will break compatibility with most extensions. Fortunately, you can get around this by doing the following:
- Go to the address bar and type about:config
- Click “I’ll be careful, I promise!”
- Right click anywhere, highlight New, and select Boolean
- Make its name extensions.checkCompatibility, and make the value False.
- Restart Firefox and give those extensions a shot.
This method doesn’t fix every extension (some are unfortunately just not compatible), but it does allow some of the big ones like Adblock Plus and Greasemonkey to work.
So far, this version seems much improved from 3.5, and I may actually start using it full time on OS X. If you like living on the edge, hit the link and give it a shot.
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