Nice timing from the folks over at the Mozilla Foundation. As calls to ditch Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in the wake of the Chinese hack attack on Google reverberate around the internet, the open source project has released a new version of its Firefox web browser.
Mozilla wisely stopped short of making any special security claims about the new Firefox 3.6, but it does claim that the new browser is 20 per cent faster than its predecessor and includes “extensive under the hood work to improve performance for everyday web tasks such as email, uploading photos, social networking, and more.”
It also delivers new features like customisable browser themes called ‘Personas,’ a new Plugin updater, improved JavaScript performance, and enhancements to familiar favorites like the Awesome Bar “for a better, more personal web experience.”
While the speed boost – if confirmed – will be welcomed by Firefox’s 350m users, it is the 6,000-plus free add-ons for Firefox and its customisation features that keep most users loyal.
So the Plugin updater, which is designed to detect out-of-date plugins, is an important addition. This is because old versions of plugins can cause crashes and other stability problems, and can also be a significant security risk. Its developers also claim that Firefox 3.6 is significantly more stable than its predecessor and that it is less prone to crashes caused by third party software.
As its name implies, another new feature called Form Complete is designed to speed up the tedious task of filling in online forms by suggesting information for fields based on a user’s most common answers for similar fields in other forms.
According to Net Applications, Firefox continued to take marketshare from IE last year, ending December with 24.61 per cent of the browser market compared to IE’s 62.69 per cent. While Apple’s Safari has also been gaining, Google’s Chrome browser is growing fastest and accounted for 4.63 per cent of the market in December compared to 4.46 per cent for Safari.
