14 DAY TRIAL // The third Beta refresh of Firefox 6 has been wrapped up and is now officially available for download from Mozilla.
The latest bits offered to early adopters by the open source browser vendor at the start of this week are yet another step forward toward the final Firefox 6.0, which is less than a month away.
As was the case with previous releases, as tempting as it might be to call the latest development milestone Firefox 6 Beta 3, this is more of an update to the existing Beta than a new testing release altogether.
Mozilla had announced the launch of the new Firefox 6 Beta refresh last week, and over the weekend, testers were able to play around with the third Firefox 6 Beta refresh candidates.
With the fully-fledged Beta refresh now available for download and testing, early adopters can update previous Firefox 6 Beta releases and start checking out the enhancements introduced by Mozilla.
According to the open source browser vendor, the third Firefox 6 Beta refresh sports the following improvements:
“- The address bar now highlights the domain of the website you're visiting
- Streamlined the look of the site identity block
- Added support for the latest draft version of WebSockets with a prefixed API
- Added support for EventSource / server-sent events
- Added support for window.matchMedia
- Added Scratchpad, an interactive JavaScript prototyping environment
- Added a new Web Developer menu item and moved development-related items into it
- Improved usability of the Web Console
- Improved the discoverability of Firefox Sync
- Reduced browser startup time when using Panorama.”
The merge date for Firefox 6 into the Release Channel is August 16, 2011, so end users should expect the final version of Firefox 5’s successor to be offered sometime starting at about three weeks from now.
Mid-August 2011 will bring with it the First Firefox 9 bits, but also the Firefox 7 Beta and Firefox 8 Aurora releases for early adopters to test.
Firefox 6 Beta, Firefox 7 Aurora and Firefox 5 for Windows are available for download here.
Firefox 6 Beta, Firefox 7 Aurora and Firefox 5 for Linux are available for download here. Firefox 6 Beta, Firefox 7 Aurora and Firefox 5 for Mac are available for download here.