The most recent release of Firefox is Firefox 3.6 RC1. The RC stands for Release Candidate, which basically means that almost 100% of the bugs and quirks that all of the beta versions have had have been ironed out to a pretty much perfect crease.
The Mozilla Corp. claims that with an increased version number, comes some pretty nice features. One of the things that I always love is the increased load time. It feels that if something takes longer than two (yes, two) seconds to load up, then it takes too long. I guess that might be a little hasty, but when I say that I mean something like a web browser. You want to be connected to the internet as fast as technologically possible. I am writing this while using Firefox 3.6, and to be honest, it loaded instantly.
Speed
I am on my laptop, and it loaded instantly. I take good care of my computers but my laptop has never loaded Firefox at such a rate. It is great to see that there are still improvements that can be made on such brilliantly written software. In case you are wondering, my laptop is a 2.1Ghz Dual Core with two gigs of memory, so it does load most things pretty quickly.. but it’s getting on in age and age always makes computers slow down no matter how well kept they may be!
Full Screen Video
Another pretty cool feature I like is the native full screen mode that Firefox 3.6 has a built in to it sexy self. With a simple right click of any video that is embedded using the <video> tag, you can easily click “Full Screen”, there is almost no time in flipping from normal screen to full screen, and you wont miss a beat of your video. This works much better than any extension that you could have been using, because it won’t start your video over at the beginning and have you re-stream it. To be short, it works pretty well.
Compatability
The one thing I really don’t like about upgrading a browser, is the worry that some of my favorite plugins and extensions wont load correctly, or at all. Well this time around the nice folks at Mozilla have stated straight up that “More than 75%” of currently released addons work, and the ones that don’t work are getting updated extremely quickly. They even have a tool made specifically for the purpose of testing your addons. “You’re favorite Add-on author will appreciate it!”
Languages
Wow, Firefox 3.6 now supports more than 70 languages! That’s right SEVENTY. I am not a linguist in any form, but wow.. that is pretty phenomenal. Having more than 70 languages under your belt is definitely an extreme. I am loving Mozilla for this, it makes the whole world seem so much more included and together as one, since we all can use the same thing without having any sort of problems.
All in all, this new version of Firefox seems to be working out pretty nicely. It is also nice that it works for all of the three major operating systems, Microsoft, Mac, and Linux. I love the load speed and all the other new things that are promised, for a full list of changes and just what this is about, be sure read the release notes.
Looking to get your grabby hands on this Firefox 3.6 RC? Then head over to this link and you can download it yourself! Let me know what you think of it, because to me, it’s lookin’ good!
