With Mozilla Firefox 3.6 the team is shifting to a shorter release schedule, so enhancements reach users sooner. It’s quite likely we’ll see more incremental releases, including Firefox 3.6 which is scheduled for release just six months after Firefox 3.5.

The next version of Firefox will be faster because of improvements to the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine and because of a focus on improving startup time performance. An asynchronous location bar and improved scrolling on Windows should also provide a noticeable speed improvement. The next version will feature the Gecko 1.9.2 rendering engine.

UI changes include tab previews of other open websites when you use the CTRL-TAB keyboard shortcut (currently you must turn it on with the browser.ctrlTab.previews config option), and lightweight themes that don’t require a restart.

CSS3 Features for web developers:

• -moz-background-size

• gradients: -moz-linear-gradient() and -moz-radial-gradient()

For a concise list of changes, see the Firefox 3.6 for developers wiki page.

Estimated Release Date: January 2010 Update: according to a draft roadmap, release date is set for November 2009.

Download Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1