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 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!
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