Mozilla releases second Firefox 3.6 beta

Mozilla, racing to release Firefox 3.6 before the end of the year, has released a second beta of the open-source browser for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Firefox 3.6 beta 1 introduced most of the new features, most visibly the ability to customize Firefox's look through Personas, less than two weeks ago. But among the 190 patches in the new beta is what Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, described in a blog post as "a mechanism to prevent incompatible software from crashing Firefox."

There also are a number of deeper changes in Firefox 3.6 that Web developers likely will be more interested in. Note that one of them, the ability to use color gradients with formatting technology called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), has changed syntax in between Firefox 3.6 beta 1 and beta 2.

Mozilla is trying to accelerate the pace of Firefox releases; Firefox 3.7 is set for release in the first half of 2010 and 4.0 some time later that year. The project faces new competition from Google's Chrome browser.

[mediateck]

thanks for the update...

[PC_Mike]

Firefox is my browser of choice, much more stable and safer than IE. Good job Mozilla!

[FF2009]

awesome update. Already seen much better improvement in speed.

[Mr. Dee]

I am on 3.0.15 right now, when 3.6 comes out, I will upgrade to the latest 3.5.x release. That's my upgrade strategy, slow, but sure.

[DecoyGSX]

Are you serious?.. That doesn't even remotely make sense. That's like just moving into XP when Win 7 came out.

[mastavic]

I agree with DecoyGSX. It seems like you're only upgrading to the next version when pushed - around the same time when Mozilla stops offering updates for the much older version.

[slumbergod]

I played around with FF3.6b1 and it didn't really feel any different to me. Apart from a slow start up in Karmic 3.5 feels pretty quick anyway. I wonder if FF3.6b2 will be noticeably faster.

too many crashes playing flash videos i hope the firefox team fix that

[johnpaultabios]

thanks for the update.... flash video firefox :)

[jmhx7]

I don't understand why firefox is bothering with 3.6 if they already have 3.7 and 4.0 in the works. What's the point of releasing a browser version that's only going to be out there a few months before the next version comes out. If 4.0 is better than 3.6 and 3.7, then perfect 4.0 and quit wasting time and resource on 3.6 and 3.7, then when 4.0 is done release it (of course by that time they will be working on 4.1, 4.5, and 5.0 probably). They release a version and then spend the few months of version span that version has fixing holes, stability issues, and other mistakes in it while the whole time working on a better version anyway. That makes absolutely no sense.

[klzjr03]

I think that they are trying to compete with Google Chrome because Chrome is already in 4.0 Beta. So Mozilla is playing catch up.

[klzjr03]

Thanks for the FireFox update, but still waiting for the Thunderbird Update.

[Corblano]

I hate your face you little fox

[hjlm]

google chrome is still much faster...

[calebstein]

I use the Firefox 3.7 trunk build and it is very fast and stable and updates automatically every few hours.

[Simon Welburn]

Firefox can stand by itself compared to the bullet ridden IE.

[yorbi]

Internet Explorer 8, the best. Most of the time when i have to fix a computer it's because of virus using firefox. Recomend still ie8.

[safemode55]

i have Firefox 3.6 beta 3 . It is very stable and quite fast.. The shock wave flash always works every time I click to go full screen on you tube videos. this i not true for opera 10.10 or chrome 3. Opera 10.10 is a bit faster than Firefox 3.6 and I love the opera tab bar and mouse jestures; But the crashes are driving me crazy. My chrome sometimes will not play you tube videos at all. So i'm making Firefox my default browser.