Firefox 6 released

[James_A]

Firefox 6.0 has been released.

Many blogs and websites prematurely announced the release yesterday, giving links to the ftp server usually used by testers and developers. However, now it has been actually released, and a "Check for Updates" resulted in a 6.6 MB download and update. Despite this, some of the official release channel links are not yet up.

What's new? According to the Release Notes:-

The latest version of Firefox has the following changes:

• The address bar now highlights the domain of the website you're visiting
  
• Streamlined the look of the site identity block
  
• Added support for the latest draft version of WebSockets with a prefixed API
  
• Added support for EventSource / server-sent events
  
• Added support for window.matchMedia
  
• Added Scratchpad, an interactive JavaScript prototyping environment
  
• Added a new Web Developer menu item and moved development-related items into it
  
• Improved usability of the Web Console
  
• Improved the discoverability of Firefox Sync
  
• Reduced browser startup time when using Panorama
  
• Fixed several stability issues
  
• Fixed several security issues
  

It's also supposed to be a bit faster.

View the full article

[Tarun]

Thanks James! Posted on frontpage and added a link into your post. :)

[greenknight]

Note that this release was right on schedule, just like the last one. It's a big change from the way Mozilla used to do things, when release dates were just targets that they always missed.

All those sites that jump the gun and announce Firefox releases prematurely (and link to release candidates) really have no excuse now - the releases are entirely predictable. You can read the schedule at Releases - MozillaWiki . The next one's Sept. 27th.

[Eldmannen]

I've been using Firefox for like a decade, I love it.

But I don't like that they're making a new major version every other week and coming up with stupid ideas like "hey lets hide the version number".

They should be improving HTML5, CSS3, SVG, WebGL support and make it pass the acid3 test.

They should be focusing on improving speed, stability, standard compliance and faster performance with less memory usage.

Oh, and they should have syntax hightlighting for JavaScript, even IE have it.