Firefox 3.6 set to emerge this month
Mozilla hopes to release the final version of Firefox 3.6 later this month and a stability-improving update code-named Lorentz by March as part of a revised updating strategy.
Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, said on Tuesday that he is pleased so far with his scrutiny of test data from the more than 1 million people using the first release candidate of Firefox 3.6, which came out late last week.
"So far we haven't found showstoppers," he said. If no more major issues are uncovered, "we're looking at releasing somewhere in the last two weeks of January," he said.
The most visible change with Firefox 3.6 is Personas, a mechanism to customize the browser's appearance with artwork, sports team logos, movie imagery, and other graphics. It had been available as a plug-in. Another change blocks third-party software from encroaching on Firefox's file system to increase stability. Support for a technology called the Web Open Font Format means many non-English browser users should have a faster time loading web pages with downloadable fonts.
For more on this story, see Firefox 3.6 due this month; next comes 'Lorentz' on CNET News.