Firefox

Current Version: 3.6.7 (July 21, 2010)

Firefox is a pretty simple product: a simple, standalone web browser from the same team of engineers who brought you the old Netscape and Mozilla "all-in-one" browser/email products. It's a perfect complement to the Thunderbird standalone email client / Usenet newsreader.

Firefox is not merely the original Mozilla browser with some user interface tweaks. Many hundreds of thousands of lines of code were added or changed from the Mozilla base. For instance, preferences are handled quite differently, in a much more user-friendly manner. As with Mozilla, Firefox's interface can be changed using themes, but Firefox - unlike Mozilla - allows you to go even further by customizing many other aspects of the user interface, including the toolbar, and much more.

Most importantly, a huge variety of Firefox Extensions enable various enhancements to the browsing experience. These are essentially small programs (or add-ons) that add new functionality to Firefox. Extensions enable Firefox to stay small and unbloated, while still enabling a great deal of customization (and additional features) to those who are more demanding. My particular favorite is the brilliant Web Developer toolbar, which adds a host of features that enable you to view and test various technical aspects of a web site, in surprisingly powerful ways.

The next natural question is: why not use Camino, which (like Firefox) has all of the great browsing characteristics of Mozilla, but with a "native" Mac OS X interface? That's a good question, but one answer lies in the fact that Firefox - being a multiplatform project - seems to be along a much more comprehensive track of improvement and fine tuning, while Camino sees much less substantial enhancement on a regular basis. More tellingly, Firefox's remarkable extensions are not supported in Camino.

Firefox is speedy, extensible, renders web pages exceptionally well, and has a highly evolved tabbed browsing interface. As of June 2008, it still clearly provides the fastest, smoothest browsing experience yet on the Mac platform. Safari has caught up to Firefox in many respects, but since Firefox is used by Windows and Linux users as well, it has undergone incredibly exhaustive testing, and has become an indisputable standard in the web browsing arena. It is critical for Mac users to take notice of such an important, widely-supported application that happens to run very well on the Macintosh platform. By using and supporting Firefox, you actually help foster a more egalitarian, platform-agnostic take on the Web - and that's what the Web is really all about.

Version 3.6 is a must-download release that aims to substantially refine version 3.5's already-polished browsing experience. Highlights include:

• Changes to how we allow third party software to integrate with Firefox in order to prevent crashes.
• Available in more than 70 languages - get your local version.
• 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.
• Support for the WOFF font format.
• Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.
• Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.

One caveat:

• Version 3.6 - as with versions 3.5, 3.0, 2.0 and 1.5 - provides Java functionality via the sometimes-flaky Java Embedding Plugin, which helps Carbon-based browsers take advantage of Apple's latest Cocoa-based Java framework (which powers Java in Safari and all browsers based upon Apple's "WebKit"). The problem here is that the Java Embedding Plugin is a "hack" in the truest sense of the word, and this may cause flakiness (especially in the browser's user interface) when viewing pages containing Java applets. Disabling Java support in Firefox's preferences - or removing the "MRJPlugin.plugin" and "JavaEmbeddingPlugin.bundle" files from the Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/Plugins folder altogether may be your best bet at getting a foundation of stability with Java-based pages that may otherwise cause you problems.

Version 3.6.7 makes the following additional changes:

• Fixed several security issues.
• Fixed several stability issues.

The Burning Edge and the Firefox release note archive have more detailed information regarding this and all previous releases.