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
remunit as a CSS unit. - image-rendering is supported for images, background images, videos and canvases.
- We now send a
reorderevent 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
hashchangeevent to a page whenever the URI part after the#changes. - We now have Geolocation
addresssupport for user-readable position information. - We now support the
completeattribute ondocument.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!
Native GTK menus ???
Thank you so much for hashchange! No more settimeout loop checks! You guys are so dependable!
Interesting changes. I particularly like the multiple backgrounds.
I am curious about the “haschange” event. I’m guessing that this will be a nice way to handle ajax requests and such. Would this be through the document object for example “document.haschange()”? And are we talking about a variable, like a boolean, or an event object being returned?
Viva la fox.
Is there a status page for a “one thread/process per tab” feature? I’m sure it’s the main reason why Chrome & SRWare Iron have such a good “end-user perceived performance”.
FF 3.6??? …
Please consider fixing FF 3.5 first. My browser still spawns new windows whenever it chooses. It literally tears off the current tab I’m navigating and opens it in a new window!
Are the multiple backgrounds REALLY supported? I read the daily “changelog” threads at MozillaZine and I don’t remember seeing multiple backgrounds there… there was some parsing patch but not full support IIRC. Enlighten me.
After a some years using Firefox as my default browser (since Phoenix 0.1) I believe that I just need one more step, one more thing, I would like a way in which Firefox could be manage by active directory policies.
I don’t know maybe an add one that simulate or accept policies made for Internet Explorer, in that way I could easily deploy on any company without worries.
I hate Internet explorer, you guys should fine a way to help us kill IE.
N, they’re really supported.
Can you support the Mac .webloc web-link file-extension on _all_ platforms? This would be so helpful to all those living on Linux, Mac, and Windows.
Wow, that’s excellent news then.
These all sound delicious.
An issue that has bubbled up to the top of my things-that-would-make-life-infinitely-easier stack would be having SVG as a regular image (backgrounds, img tag, etc.) Is there the slightest chance this will appear in 3.6?
voracity, I don’t think there’s an chance of that at this point, no.
Of the CSS extensions, which are likely to make it into CSS standards in the future? It’s nice to see new features, but I’m not sure it’ll be nice if in five years we find our CSS still peppered with -webkit-* and -moz-* extensions.
Better SVG Support would be great.
soso, better in what sense? What specific features are you thinking?
Nice work on the Awesomebar speedups
Ah well, I guess I’ll have to wait till 3.7 or 4.0. Plenty of other great things to look forward to in 3.6.
I agree: SVG as images would be cool, it should not matter whether an img is a bitmap or a vector graphic. Under “if your browser rocks”, the following page shows text on Firefox and an image on Safari:
http://e.metaclarity.org/52/cross-browser-svg-issues/
The hashchange event seems very useful for handling the ajax back button problem. Is it a standard event (as in W3C or whatever) or is it Firefox-specific? Do other browsers support a similar event?
“The TraceMonkey JavaScript engine has continued to get faster.”
Does it finally have x86_64 support?
drago01, you could just look at the bug report…