Mozilla today release version 3.6 of their popular Firefox browser. Included in this new release was the former Mozilla Labs development, Personas which allows you to customise your browser easily skin your browser with thousands of pre-made skins and to develop your own. At the minute my favourite Persona features Totoro from the Studio Ghibli film, "My Neighbour Totoro". One thing I like about the way Personas works is you don't have to apply a Persona to test it - you can just hover over it on the Personas website.
In addition to a brand new feature is a small increase in JavaScript performance, but no where near as big an improvement as the one made between version 3 and 3.5; but any improvement is a positive move. Here are some of the other improvements they've made:
- Protection from out-of-date plugins to keep users safer as they browse.
- Open, native video can now be displayed full screen and supports poster frames.
- The ability for web developers to indicate that scripts should run asynchronously to speed up page load times.
- Continued support for downloadable web fonts using the new WOFF font format.
- Support for new CSS attributes such as gradients, background sizing, and pointer events.
- Support for new DOM and HTML5 specifications including the Drag & Drop API and the File API, which allow for more interactive web pages.
On the subject of out-of-date plugins I was expecting there to be some of the ones I use that would not be ready for the new release as there always are a few. Unfortunately, despite hoping otherwise, I was right and a number of plugins did indeed fail to work. Amongst the ones I use which don't work in Firefox 3.6 are:
- Gmail Manager
- Google Gears
- Html Validator
- Live HTTP Headers
- Page Speed
- SEOpen
- Tamper Data
- TAW3 en un clic
Some of those plugins I'm quite disappointed to see weren't ready, especially considering the release period for 3.6 was extended. Of course it's possible to edit the plugin to change the maximum version number they can be run on but it's not something you should really have to do. So because of third parties, and not Mozilla, I'll now be putting off upgrading Firefox on my Macbook Pro as I use some of those for debugging purposes.
UPDATE: One annoyance I've found is that I can no longer paste into Google Wave, presumably because Google Gears no longer works.
