browsers

Mozilla Officially Launches Firefox 6

Frederic Lardinois

Aug 16, 2011 — 1 min read

Mozilla today officially launched Firefox 6, the latest stable version of its popular browser. Since its switch to a more frequent release schedule, Mozilla has already pushed out a number of releases, so version numbers themselves are becoming significantly less useful at this point and most of the updates are rather small. Indeed, users who expect this to be a major update will be sorely disappointed as Mozilla only made minor tweaks to the user interface and didn’t add any major new features in this new version besides a new permissions tool for site-specific permissions.

That, of course, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a plethora of bug fixes and new features for developers in Firefox 6. Regular users, however, won’t notice much of a difference if they were already using Firefox 5 before. Most of your addons should also continue to work just fine. While earlier updates often broke many of the most popular updates, this has become less and less of an issue over the last few releases.

What’s New

Here is Mozilla’s official list of what’s new in Firefox 6: [list]

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 [/list]

Firefox 6 for Mobile

In addition to the desktop version, Mozilla also launched a new version of Firefox for Android. This new version features a slightly updated user interface and was tweaked to work better on tablets.

Get New Versions Earlier with the Beta and Aurora Channel

Intrepid users who want an early look at new Firefox builds can also switch to the Beta and Aurora channel (or even the Nightly channel if you feel really adventurous). This way, you can get new features even earlier and help Mozilla by reporting issues with these test builds.

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