Firefox News: Good and Bad

Firefox is getting a lot of press lately: Some good and some bad.

January 12th, 2010 at 8:00am — Comments: (0) — By: Jonathan Danylko — Tags: Firefox

Firefox is receiving a lot of news lately.

Below is a list of news posts I've seen over the last couple of days.

Good: Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate is out!

The latest Firefox 3.6 RC1 is now out and ready to be tested. If you are so brave an individual, download it, examine the release notes, and report back here to discuss what you like and don't like.

According to the Mozilla Developer Center, here are the following features added to this release:

• Users can change the browser’s appearance with a single click using Personas.
• Firefox 3.6 alerts users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
• Changes to how third-party software integrates with Firefox to increase stability.
• Improved automatic form fill provides better options from your form history.
• Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster frames.
• Support for the WOFF font format.
• Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.
• The ability to run scripts asynchronously to speed up page load times.
• Support for the HTML5 File API.
• Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.

Awesome!

There are a lot of updates in this 3.6 RC1 release, but with the good come the bad.

BAD: Firefox 3.6 Add-On architecture will be replaced

Don't fret, the add-on architecture won't disappear completely, it will only be replaced. However, developers may need to revisit their add-on to see if it's backwards-compatible with the new Firefox through the Add-On Compatibility Reporter.

The current architecture will be replaced with JetPack, Mozilla's new way to extend and personalize the web.

The good news is that the browser is evolving: it's not just for add-ons or themes anymore. JetPack will allow developers and designers to extend the browser in multiple ways.  Instead of a simple add-on, it could be a entire suite of additions for a particular industry (I'm guessing that the first step was Collections).

Based on the screenshots I've seen of Firefox 4.0, this is evidence of a sleeker browsing experience (ref: Mashable)

UPDATE: As soon as I published this, Lifehacker reported on Firefox 4 Design Mock-Ups Gets an Update! Awesome!