Editor’s note: On Friday PT, Mozilla released the release candidate for 3.6. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement reposted below.
The Mozilla community is proud to announce the availability of a release candidate of Firefox 3.6. This preview software is available for free download and has been issued as an automatic update to all Firefox 3.6 beta users. Over 75% of the thousands of Firefox Add-ons have now been upgraded by their authors to be compatible with Firefox 3.6. If your favorite Add-on isn’t yet marked as compatible, you can help the Add-on author test it out using the Add-on Compatibility Reporter. This release candidate may update itself periodically, and will eventually be exactly the same as the final Firefox 3.6 release itself.
Firefox 3.6 (built on the Gecko 1.9.2 platform) introduces several new features for users and developers:
- Users can change the browser’s appearance with a single click using Personas.
- Firefox 3.6 alerts users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
- Changes to how third-party software integrates with Firefox to increase stability.
- Improved automatic form fill provides better options from your form history.
- 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.
- The ability to run scripts asynchronously to speed up page load times.
- Support for the HTML5 File API
- Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.
Web developers and Add-on developers should read more detail about the many new features in Firefox 3.6 for developers on the Mozilla Developer Center. For the full list of changes since the alpha release of Firefox 3.6 see this list (it’s big).
If you’d like to get a sneak peek at Firefox 3.6, please download the release candidate from www.mozilla.com.
If you already have Firefox 3.6 Beta, you should be automatically updated to the release candidate. You can also choose to manually “Check for Updates” from the Help menu.
As always, the Mozilla community would appreciate hearing about any feedback you have about this release, or any bugs you may find.
