Firefox 6.0 Released
by Andrew Cunningham on August 16, 2011 12:30 PM ESTIn keeping with its new accelerated release schedule, Mozilla released the stable version of Firefox 6.0 to Windows, Mac, and Linux users today, just over seven weeks after the June 21 release of Firefox 5.0. A new version of Firefox for Android was also released.
In addition to the normal stability and security patches, Firefox 6.0 adds a few new features to the browser. First, like Chrome, URLs in the Firefox address bar Awesome Bar now render a site's domain in black and the rest of the URL in a slightly lighter grey.
Highlighted domains
Users of the Panorama tab grouping feature should enjoy some speed increases, since tab groups are only loaded when they're actually selected.
On the developer side of things, the Web Console now features auto-complete and a user-customizable location, and a new Scratchpad utility allows for testing of JavaScript code.
The Scratchpad, accessible from the Web Developer menu
These are the major additions, but for a complete list of features you can see the Firefox 6.0 release notes.
Performance and resource usage are roughly the same as in Firefox 5.0 - if you're looking for notable gains in that area, you'll have to wait for Firefox 7.0, which is making memory usage reduction one of its main goals. Firefox 6.0 is currently available from Mozilla.org, and the stable version of Firefox 7.0 is due to be released on September 27.
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Mr Perfect - Tuesday, August 16, 2011 - link
I don't know when chrome started highlighting domains, but IE has been doing it since version 8 came out.Millsington - Tuesday, August 16, 2011 - link
I can't wait to find out what terrible UI changes they made so I can wait for addons that change it back to normal.Leonick - Tuesday, August 16, 2011 - link
Or you could simply not update if it's such a big deal :prisa2000 - Tuesday, August 16, 2011 - link
This one https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57465... was quite a surprise to me (and some others). Bigger surprise however was the way how Mozilla devs handled that.I do not know, if someone from Mozilla actually explained why they insist on this insanely fast major releases.
risa2000 - Tuesday, August 16, 2011 - link
BTW, do not get confused by "VERIFY FIXED". This is just an euphemism for "we do not care".Tanclearas - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - link
Lots of anger and frustration from a handful of users about a feature a HUGE percentage of FF users never knew existed (because they don't really need it).Features get added/removed from programs all the time. At least there exists a method within FF to get that capability back. Lots of fire over what amounts to a non-issue. A feature request is not a bug.
Egglick - Tuesday, August 16, 2011 - link
I've been using Firefox since version 0.6, but these new rapid updates have me seriously turned off. I'm not going to deal with the stupid interface changes, bugs, and broken add-ons each time they upgrade a full version number every 4-6 weeks. I just want a stable, functional browser with my 4 add-ons that work properly. Once I'm forced to upgrade from 3.6.18, I might jump ship.Daniel Egger - Tuesday, August 16, 2011 - link
The English Mac version of FF 6.0 shrunk massively from 70 MB to 20 MB installed size and thus starts a whole lot quicker. It is also slightly faster and scores a little higher in http://www.html5test.com/. For daily browsing purposes I've been a huge Camino fan the last few years and only used Firefox for development purposes but with version 6 there's a good chance that might change...tayb - Tuesday, August 16, 2011 - link
Abandoned Firefox well over a year ago when I noticed it was using over 1GB of system memory. For a web browser. The only thing I use it for now is to test development projects and that's it.Mr Perfect - Tuesday, August 16, 2011 - link
I had heard somewhere that Firefox would have a built in PDF viewer, so we could ditch Adobe's version. The release notes for V5 and V6 don't seem to mention it, so was this abandoned, meant for some future version, or completely made up?