Mozilla welcomes Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1

 

Gallery

By Stuart Turton

Posted on 10 Aug 2009 at 08:35

Mozilla has released the first alpha of Firefox 3.6, which should bring some added polish to the popular browser.

Codenamed Namoroka the browser has been billed as a "minor upgrade" to Firefox. Of course, the same thing was said about Firefox 3.5, which was ultimately stuffed with so many new features the version number had to be bumped from 3.1.

However, Mozilla seems keen to avoid a repeat and has promised "an incremental release, building upon the success of Firefox 3.5."

At the heart of Firefox 3.6's changes are improvements to the responsiveness of the browser. Perhpas with one eye on the incredibly slick Chrome, Mozilla is promising that Firefox 3.6 will startup quicker, and be speedier opening tabs and loading bookmarked pages. The history and download managers are also slated for improvements, with Mozilla promising to make them more intuitive.

Namoroka will also bring a welcome speed boost thanks to the new Gecko 1.9.2 rendering engine. The alpha should also tweak the troublesome TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which played a large part in holding up the release of Firefox 3.5.

Firefox 3.6 should hit beta in early September, followed by a release candidate in late October. Expect a final version sometime in November.