Articles for August 7th, 2009

As covered on the Mozilla Developer Center, Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1 is now available for download. And we’ve been busy since Firefox 3.5.

Web developers will be interested in a number of features that are new in Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1:

• The TraceMonkey JavaScript engine has continued to get faster.
• We’ve made a huge number of improvements to overall DOM and element layout performance. In some cases we’re much, much faster. We’ll cover details on those in a later post.
• The compositor landing has made it possible to fix a large number of interactions between web content, CSS and plugins. We’ll be talking about this in a later post as well.
• We now support the -moz-background-size CSS property which lets you set the size of background images.
• We now support CSS Gradients.
• We now support multiple background images.
• We now support the rem unit as a CSS unit.
• image-rendering is supported for images, background images, videos and canvases.
• We now send a reorder event to embedded frames and iframes when their document is loaded.
• We’ve removed the getBoxObjectFor() method. It was non-standard and exposed all kinds of non-standard stuff to the web.
• We now send a hashchange event to a page whenever the URI part after the # changes.
• We now have Geolocation address support for user-readable position information.
• We now support the complete attribute on document.readystate.

You can keep track of this list and other features for XUL and add-ons developers on the Firefox 3.6 for developers page on developer.mozilla.org

Unlike the year that passed between Firefox 3 and Firefox 3.5, we expect that this 3.6 release will be released in a small number of months. Our main focus for the 3.6 release will be end-user perceived performance, TraceMonkey and DOM performance and new web developer features.

Enjoy and test away!