GigaOM » Collaboration

Firefox 3.6 Released, But I'm Not Switching From Chrome

Simon Mackie — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:56:57 +0000

Mozilla today released Firefox 3.6, which, as I reported back in November when the popular open-source browser was released in beta, sports improved performance, personas (the ability to easily switch between different skins for your browser), and updated support for web standards, including for the Web Open Font Format (WOFF). You can download it now from Mozilla for Windows, Mac and Linux.

As much as I like Firefox, I have to say that on my Mac it’s been relegated to second choice behind my new favorite: Google Chrome. Even though Firefox 3.6 is pretty quick, Chrome has blistering speed, and I love the fact that in Chrome a crash in one tab does not kill the entire browser. Chrome doesn’t yet have the massive extension ecosystem that makes Firefox so useful (and is the reason why I will probably never uninstall it), but it’s going to take a lot of improvement to the speed and stability of Firefox to get me to switch back and make it my primary browser again.

How about you? Do you still use Firefox, or have you switched to Chrome?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Firefox 3.6b4 Fixes Facebook Chat, Other Bugs

Simon Mackie — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:00:13 +0000

Yesterday, while many WebWorkerDaily readers were taking a well-deserved day off and chowing down on Thanksgiving turkey, the team at Mozilla was busy pushing out beta 4 of Firefox 3.6. This new update includes over 140 bug fixes, but perhaps most importantly (to me, at least) it fixes the problems that beta 3 had with Facebook chat. If your beta has not updated automatically, it’s definitely worth updating now via Help -> Check for Updates.

Are you running the beta of Firefox 3.6? Let us know what you think of it below.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Firefox 3.6b2 Released

Simon Mackie — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:32:42 +0000

Mozilla has made beta 2 of Firefox 3.6 available. If you are already running beta 1, you can use Help->Check for Updates to get the latest version.

Running the release through the Sunspider JavaScript performance benchmarks shows that performance is virtually unchanged from beta 1, but according to Mozilla, this version fixes around 190 bugs so it is definitely worth downloading (although I have to say that I have been running beta 1 on both Windows and Mac machines for a week or so and have had no issues so far).

Are you running Firefox 3.6? Let us know what you think of it below.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

WWD Screencast: Firefox 3.6 Tab Previews

Simon Mackie — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:30:12 +0000

With the new beta of Firefox 3.6, new tab previewing functionality has been made available in Firefox — you can preview tabs using the “List all tabs” button, and you can see a preview when using Ctrl-Tab to switch between tabs.

These two new features are not enabled by default, so you’ll need to go to the about:config page and toggle “browser.allTabs.previews” and “browser.ctrlTab.previews” to “true” (either right-click on the entry and hit “Toggle”, or just double-click the entry).

I made a quick screencast showing how to enable tab previews and how it works:

(Via gHacks)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.