Mozilla are ever working towards building a better browser and to keep up (or stay in front) of it's competitors. For most Windows users if you've got a browser other than IE it's likely to by Firefox and with good reason - it's got some great features, it's reliable, and secure. In recent months though it hasn't been the fastest of browsers with competitors such as Safari and Chrome pushing in front of the performance war. Mozilla are hoping this will change when version 3.6 is released, but Beta 1 is already showing some promise.
Firefox 3.6 Beta is built on Mozilla's Gecko 1.9.2 web rendering platform, which has been under development for several months and contains many improvements for web developers, Add-on developers and users. This version is also faster and more responsive than previous versions, and has been optimized to run on small device operating systems such as Windows CE and Maemo.
In addition to this the Mozilla Labs product, Personas, is now built into the browser so the ability to apply themes to your browser is easily within reach without having to know about Mozilla's side projects. This move is probably to directly compete with Google Chrome's ability to easily skin the browser. There are also the following improvements:
- Notification for out-of-date plugins detected in use on a page,
- Native video can now be displayed full-screen or inside "poster frames" (HTML 5),
- Supports the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) for using your own TrueType or OpenType fonts,
- General performance increases (including to JavaScript engine),
- Improves support for new CSS, DOM and HTML 5 technologies,
It'll be interesting to see what the use of WOFF does to the internet and how designers use this to replace the sIFR methods they used previously. Of course though if everyone started using fonts similar to Comic Sans then it wouldn't be particularly good (though I'm sure most designers wouldn't use that!).
