Many of us thought that Mozilla had gone to crazy town when they announced their “Rapid Release Timeline” for Firefox, with new full version releases every six weeks or so. But after taking seemingly forever to get through the first few versions, we’ve jumped from version 4 to 6 in just a few short weeks.
Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 6 on Tuesday, after pushing out Firefox 5 eight weeks ago in late June and Firefox 4 back in March. While that sounds crazy enough, the company is already on the fast track with Firefox 7, scheduled for release on September 27 -- with Firefox 8 and 9 already queued up in the company’s “aurora” and “nightly” channels prior to beta.
While computer users have become accustomed to lots of new features and gloss with major version numbers, that’s not quite the case with Firefox, which really looks no different from the previous version. According to arsTechnica, the Product lead on Firefox has even gone so far as to suggest removing the version number from the browser entirely -- you’ll either be up to date or not, similar to how Google Chrome handles their updates.
It’s unlikely that Mozilla will entirely eliminate version numbers from Firefox, so for the foreseeable future we’ll have to wrap our minds around the concept that a major new version number doesn’t necessarily equate to tons of new features. So without further ado, here’s a list of what’s new in Firefox 6:
- 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
Firefox 6 can be downloaded from Mozilla’s website, with the new version also available for other platforms, including Android. Not feeling the love with version number six? Fear not, version number seven will arrive before the leaves start to fall.
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vterm
August 18, 2011 at 2:41pm
I think that Mozilla should probably concentrate on making a faster and better browser thus eliminating the memory leaks....
I really see no purpose behind this policy!
A new major version every few weeks!
What's with that?
And what about all the 3rd party add-ons we use?
Possible incompatibilities between major versions with render them useless!
And i don't think that any third party developer would be able to keep up with such frequent major version releases!!!
Roger Workman
August 17, 2011 at 11:10am
Geoduck: Firefox 4.x is obsolete. Your current options for up-to-date Firefox are 6.x or 3.6.x.
I would also like to give a shout out to the wonderful TenFourFox project, which has kept up with Mozilla's crazy version updates for the PowerPC platform, which Mozilla dropped support for after Firefox 3.6.x.
jescott418
August 17, 2011 at 10:01am
I think Firefox has made it clear Firefox is not about business. But I am not sure what its about at all anymore? You have Microsoft who can't hardly muster a new Internet Explorer every two years and Chrome will be up too version 100 in a couple years and Firefox seems to want to follow that lead. I just want them to have a good stable current version before moving on to something else? In my own opinion Internet Explorer does this the best. Safari is pretty good and even Chrome might have frequent updates but at least they fix things. That's more then I can say for Firefox.
Geoduck
August 17, 2011 at 8:13am
If you support a business office this sucks.
All major software updates have to be tested with our vendors, banks, and other web sites before we can push it out to users. This takes a couple of weeks. Rapid major updates make a heck of a lot of work for us. So we're setting on 4.x until Mozilla gets off the stupid-train and lets something settle for a while. If they don't we'll just start looking for a browser from somebody else.
