First beta of Firefox 3.6 released

Stephen Shankland CNET News

Published: 02 Nov 2009 17:08 GMT

Mozilla on Friday introduced beta version 1 of Firefox 3.6, which includes its new process for updating the software more frequently.

According to Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, and Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard, the new features include Personas, which lets people customise the browser appearance. Personas has been available as an add-on, so there are plenty of Personas skins to choose from.

Other features include faster execution of web-based JavaScript programs, better browser responsiveness and faster startup time. Mozilla has been working on JavaScript performance for many months, but the urgency of that and other performance improvements increased with the arrival of Google's Chrome browser.

For more on this story, see Mozilla releases first beta of Firefox 3.6 on CNET News.