Firefox 3.6 Delivers More Personalization, Faster Performance

If Mozilla's Firefox represents the biggest challenge to the Web-browsing dominance of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the battle might have just gotten a little tighter.

Mozilla rolled out Firefox 3.6 Thursday, claiming that it's 20 percent faster than Firefox 3.5 and includes "extensive under the hood work" to improve performance for e-mail, photo uploading, social networking and more, according to a blog item by Mozilla's Melissa Shapiro on the organization's Web site.

Other new features in Firefox 3.6 include the ability to personalize the look of the browser using its Personas feature, the ability to detect out-of-date plug-ins, improved JavaScript performance, HTML 5 audio and video support and automatic fill-ins for forms.

Mozilla also claims that Firefox 3.6 now suffers far fewer crashes caused by third-party software.

For developers, Firefox 3.6 now supports Web Open Font Format (WOFF) and linear and radial CSS gradients that allow for a smoother transition between colors, according to Mozilla. It also exposes the orientation of the laptop or device to Web pages to allow for a cleaner look.

Firefox accounted for 24.6 percent share of the Web browser market in December, according to Net Applications. Microsoft's IE held 62.7 percent share, while Google's Chrome browser accounted for 4.6 percent share.

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