14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla is cooking a new Beta Build of the next iteration of its open source browser. Early adopters will have a fresh revision, the third one since Firefox 3.6 debuted into Beta stage, available for download soon. Whether referred to as Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 or Firefox 3.6 Beta revision 3, the new release is just around the corner. In fact, Mozilla plans to release it either later today or tomorrow morning. At the start of this week, the company building the Firefox open source browser was undecided as to the specific deadline for the availability of Firefox 3.6 Beta 3/Revision 3.
Firefox 3.6 codenamed Namoroka “Beta 3 refresh should be coming Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning. Beta 3 includes a components directory lockdown feature,” Mozilla revealed. In this regard, Beta 3/revision 3 will be offered to Firefox 3.6 users at just a week after the introduction of Beta 2/revision 2.
With the introduction of the components directory lockdown feature, Mozilla is essentially closing the door to the browser’s “components” directory for third-party extension developers. Essentially, devs that work to extend Firefox 3.6 will no longer be able to have their code added to the “components” directory in Firefox 3.6, as they are able to do in version 3.5 and earlier. Instead, moving forward, the “components” will be reserved exclusively for Firefox 3.6, and nothing more.
“If you’re a Firefox user, this should be 100% positive. You don’t have to change anything, your regular add-ons should continue to work properly – you just might notice fewer crashes or odd bugs. If you do notice that something has stopped working, particularly a third party addition to Firefox, you might want to contact the producer of that addition to ensure they know about the change,” revealed Mozilla's Johnathan Nightingale. “If you’re a Firefox component developer, this shouldn’t be a big change, either. If you’re already packaging your additions as an XPI, installed as an add-on it’s business as usual. If you have been dropping components directly, though, you’ll need to change to an XPI-based approach.”
Early adopters and developers that want to have a look at Firefox 3.6 Beta 3/Revision 3, before it is released, should know that Mozilla has made a preview of the release, available for download via its FTP servers. Still, the fully-fledged Firefox 3.6 Beta 3/Revision 3 is not that far away, for those who want to avoid a nightly release.
The latest releases of Firefox, including Firefox 3.6 Beta 2/Revision 2, are available for download here.