The Mozilla Blog

Editor’s note: Mozilla released Firefox 3.6 beta 1 on Friday, October 30, 2009 at 5:20 pm PT. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement reposted below for more details.

Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 is now available for download. This beta version of the next version of  Firefox is built on the Gecko 1.9.2 web rendering engine, containing many improvements for web developers, Add-on developers, and users. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3.6 can be followed in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #planning or #developers.

This first revision of the Beta of Firefox 3.6 / Gecko 1.9.2 introduces several new features:

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• Firefox 3.6 will alert users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.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

Web developers and Add-on developers should read more detail about the many new features in Firefox 3.6 for developers on the Mozilla Developer Center. For the full list of changes since the alpha release, see this list.

Testers can download Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 builds for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in 53 different languages. Developers should also read the Firefox 3.6 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

At this time most Add-ons have not yet been upgraded by their authors to be compatible with Firefox 3.6 Beta. If you wish to help test your Add-ons, please also download and install the Add-on Compatibility Reporter – your favorite Add-on author will appreciate it!

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

Want to get into the Halloween spirit?  Today the Personas team welcomes over 40 different community-created persona Halloween designs.  Each design is now available on the Personas gallery.  To learn more, see the Mozilla labs blog post and these exciting new designs.

Last week, the Personas community welcomed its 30,000th persona design.  Also, within the new few weeks stay tuned – we’ll be officially launching a Holiday category, which you can start using today!

Since we announced Firefox 3.5 on June 30th, community members all over the world have been planning amazing parties (150+ to date) to celebrate and share their passion about their favorite browser.

One of the questions that I am frequently asked is, “Why are parties necessary?” I feel that it’s important to take take time to have fun and reflect on everything the Mozilla community has accomplished. The launch of a new version of Firefox is the perfect excuse to meet up and spread the word.

I’ve always been under the impression that “pictures are worth 1000 words” so I went out to collect as many pictures from our community parties as I could.

I’ve assembled a PDF which shows all of the parties that were submitted and links to many of the photo galleries. You can view the presentation here: