Browsersphere

If you haven’t already heard, Firefox 3.6 will be officially released today.  If you’re interested in what goes into a Firefox release, you can follow along live with the release of Firefox 3.6 over at Air Mozilla.  As I write this, several Mozilla employees are introducing themselves to those who are watching.  There appear to be two groups, one from Mountainview, California, and the other from Toronto, Canada, participating in the live video feed, at least at the time being.  Several minutes ago, Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s Director of Firefox, appeared to announce that Firefox 3.6 will go live on the website around 8:25 to 8:40 Eastern time.  Given the current time, I’m guessing that’s PM.  That being said, firefox.com currently redirects to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/upgrade.html which officially points to the Firefox 3.6 download and reports that the new version has already been downloaded over 37,500 times.

Head on over to Air Mozilla to follow along with the release day proceedings.

Tags: Air Mozilla, Downloads, Firefox, Firefox 3.6, Mike Beltzner, Releases

As promised, Firefox 3.6 RC1 was released yesterday.  Despite my warnings against downloading the candidate of the release candidate earlier this week, it doesn’t look like there was ever more than one candidate, so if you jumped the gun and downloaded that candidate, you’ve likely got the same build anyway.

Despite the fact that Firefox 3.6 RC1 was released on schedule yesterday, it has received very little attention from the usual official outlets, as far as I can tell.  For example, there is no mention of the new release candidate on the main Firefox page, and there has been no mention of the release via Firefox’s Twitter account.

Nevertheless, the RC1 build looks official, and the following are some of its key features and changes:

• Changes have been made to the way third party software integrates with Firefox in an attempt to avoid crashes.
• Nearly 100 bugs have been fixed since the last beta build to improve stability, performance, etc.
• JavaScript can now be loaded asynchronously, another performance boost.
• Improved DOM, CSS and HTML5 support.

If you decide to give Firefox 3.6 RC1 a spin, feel free to share your thoughts on the new release here in comments.

Update: I should clarify that the RC1 build is at least mentioned on the beta releases page.

Tags: Crashes, CSS, DOM, Firefox, Firefox 3.6, HTML5, JavaScript, Performance, Release Candidates, Releases, Stability