Firefox 6 now in alpha, sports privacy features, more HTML5
updated 07:30 pm EDT, Fri May 27, 2011
Developer tools and enhanced add-on manager too
Mozilla's development cycle dictates that three generations of its popular web browser Firefox must be in an active cycle. Thus, Firefox 4 is the current mainstream release (currently at 4.0.1), Firefox 5 has recently entered beta, and that means that Firefox 6, known as Aurora, has just begun its development cycle, now offering a rough alpha release for testing and feedback.
Apart from being in a very unfinished state, the new alpha does show off some new features, including a much-enhanced add-ons manager, new features for Panorama, further support of HTML5, a few new developer tools (including a Javascript code "scratchpad" that allows live testing) and a Permission Manager window (accessible by typing about:permissions in the URL bar) that gives users the ability to set different permissions for every site (if desired), including cookie, pop-up, offline storage and location access settings.
Web developers will find that Aurora offers a number of improvements and new features, starting the Scratchpad but extending to improved networking (using a more recent Websockets), support for HTML5 properties such as "progress" and "track," fixes for tags like "canvas" and CSS text attributes, along with other changes detailed here.
A quick run-through of a few sites with Aurora showed plenty of speed, along with plenty of rendering errors, and of course most add-ons, themes and other extras do not work with it.
Dedicated MacNNer
Joined: Jul 2004
Who cares?
After the abomination that is Firefox 4 on OS X, why should I or anybody else care?
FF4 starts like gangbusters, works great for a few minutes and then slows down to a crawl. Can somebody tell me how 6 non-graphics, non-Flash intensive tabs can consume 1.5GB of RAM?
This is completely repeatable on both of my Macs. I've seen many complaints about it from others as well.
I have removed FF4 from my OS X machines and will never reinstall it.