 (Source: STUPID IE)
New browser version brings improved rendering engine, more secure plug-ins
Mozilla's Firefox
3.6 has seen a couple of minor delays, but Mozilla has finally
finished the browser and released a finalized version into the wild.
Mozilla aired the new browser this morning.
The browser can be
found for Windows here,
for Mac here,
and for Linux users here.
Mozilla has now linked these downloads on their
Firefox
front page, though the banner graphics still reads Firefox 3.5 (the text all talks about Firefox 3.6). Mozilla's
download tracker, also, appears stuck on another older version --
Firefox 3.5.3, though perhaps it's really tracking all Firefox
global downloads.
The new browser build improves the security
of Mozilla's popular extensions interface. It also offers a
faster and more robust version of Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine,
Gecko 1.9.2 (Firefox 3.5 used Gecko 1.9.1). The update also
offers toolbar skins, out-of-date plugin notifications, and support
for the WOFF open webfont format, among other things.
In our
internal testing, we've found the latest builds of Firefox 3.6 to be
quite polished, eliminating the crashes we experienced
in the first beta. The new version feels slightly faster
that Firefox 3.5, when using graphics heavy websites like Facebook or
YouTube.
With the release of Firefox 3.6, Mozilla looks to
gain
more ground on rival Microsoft. Over the last couple of
years Mozilla has been steadily nibbling on Microsoft market share,
as Internet Explorer's browsing share has slipped. Firefox now
sits as the browser primarily used by over 30 percent of users
worldwide, according to some recent estimates.
Next up for
Mozilla is an update to 3.6 called Lorentz. With this
update Mozilla will finally implement out-of-process plug-ins (OOPP),
to isolate Adobe's Flash, Apple's Quicktime, and other commonly used
plug-ins. This should help eliminate many of the Flash-related
crashes and freezes, and also improve the browser's overall
security.
And Mozilla has already begun work on Firefox 3.7 which implements the snazzy Windows Vista and Windows 7
Aero
Glass look for the first time. The next version may also
feature another rendering engine upgrade -- Gecko 1.9.3 -- which
currently is being brewed. Mozilla is rumored to be targeting
May-June 2010 release. That will be followed by Firefox 4.0 in
October-November 2010 (according to Mozilla's
roadmap, though some say it may be delayed until 2011).
"The whole principle [of censorship] is wrong. It's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't have steak." -- Robert Heinlein
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