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The third beta of Mozilla's open source Firefox 3.6 browser is now adding fixing 83 bugs and added several new features too. From 83 bugs fixed, 13 ware critical.

This version is built on Mozilla's Gecko 1.9.2 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for several months and contains many improvements for web developers, add-on developers and users. This version is also faster and more responsive than previous versions, and has been optimized to run on small device operating systems such as Windows CE and Maemo.

The latest update is intended to prevent crashes Firefox closing code injection directly to the directory.

What Does This Mean?

Add-ons are the standard mechanism for extending the browser's capabilities. In addition, though, there has historically been another way to do it. Third-party applications installed on your machine would sometimes try extend Firefox by just adding their own code directly to the “components” directory, where much of Firefox’s own code is stored.

There are no special abilities that come from doing things this way, but there are some significant disadvantages. For one thing, components installed in this way aren’t user-visible, meaning that users can’t manage them through the add-ons manager or disable them if they’re encountering difficulties for proper browser run. What’s worse, components dropped blindly into Firefox in this way don’t carry version information with them, which means that when users upgrade Firefox and these components become incompatible, there’s no way to tell Firefox to disable them. This can lead to all kinds of unfortunate behavior: lost functionality, performance woes, and outright crashing – often immediately on startup.

So In Firefox 3.6 beta, Mozilla is closing this door. Third-party applications can still extend Firefox via standard mechanism, like add-ons and plug-ins, but the components directory will be for Firefox only.

Also:

• The ability to run scripts asynchronously to speed up page load times.

• Users can now change their browser's appearance with a single click, with built in support for Personas.

• Firefox 3.6 will alert users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
  

• Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster frames.

• Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.

• Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.

If you're willing to work on unstable version of Firefox and you're an early adopter eagerly waiting to try your hands on then go ahead and download the beta version.

This beta is available in more than 60 languages - get your local version.

Are you exited about the new version? Miss your third-party apps? Let us know in comments.