While the last betas followed up each other almost weekly, this latest beta took a bit longer. Surely everyone is waiting for the first release candidates to appear or a final release before the end of the year. But alas...

Don't be too hard on the folks at Mozilla, as competition has grown much more volatile with the recent release of Chrome 4.0 Beta by Google, which includes extension support and is available on all major platforms.

Compared with previous betas, even this release comes with a bucket full of new fixes. With a hundred changes in store, the road to a most stable release should be smooth and near by now. A lot of crashes (including Flash Player 10) have been fixed as well as tweaking the newish security model for extensions.

If you're already using the beta release you'll get an update notification automatically (or by going to Help > Check for Updates). Of course you can download the full installer as well.

While everyone is waiting for the upcoming Firefox 3.6, the folks at Mozilla released yet another maintenance release of Firefox 3.5, bringing the version up to 3.5.6.

As usual with these updates, the release notes are crowded with either stability or security bug fixes. In these release three new critical labeled security holes were plugged, concerning: integer overflow, crash in libtheora video library, memory safety fixes in liboggplay media library and crashes with evidence of memory corruption. Other issues that were plugged are: NTLM reflection vulnerability, location bar spoofing vulnerabilities, privilege escalation via chrome window.opener and GeckoActiveXObject exception messages can be used to enumerate installed COM objects.

The rest of the stability bug fixes can be revised on the bug list from Mozilla, and contains a lot of crasher bug fixes. As expected this release is a recommended update for all Firefox users and will be offered automatically when you use Firefox 3.5. Of course a manual download is also possible if you don't have Firefox installed.

First Microsoft announced and showed performance benchmarks of Internet Explorer 9, which leverages your GPU to speed up rendering. Playing a so-can-we-game, Bas Schouten demonstrated a Firefox build using Direct2D, the replacement for GDI.

Suffice to note is that competition is good. With Microsoft and Mozilla sparring on another dimension of gaining performance, instead of just the JavaScript engine, we the users can only benefit. As you may know from before, Opera Software is working silent (but deadly?) on Vega, which would introduce GPU powered rendering for at least several HTML 5 / SVG elements. Plans from Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome are unknown, but you can bet they'll keep a close eye on it all.

So what are the gains of using the GPU, through the means of Direct2D, for rendering? Well, looking at the graph on Bas' blog, it can reduce time twice as much when browsing popular web sites such as Facebook, Google and Twitter. There is one catch though, you'll need Windows Vista or Windows 7 and a preferably a DX10+ card.

When Direct2D support in Firefox is included by default, and if it will also become cross platform (with the use of OpenGL) is still unknown, but surely the development of GPU usage is a warm welcome to increase performance overall.

Another week, another Firefox 3.6 beta release. The folks behind the Firefox movement are working hard to get this release as solid as possible before the end of the year, using a faster beta release cycle than before.

But that doesn't mean that the amount of changes is reduced. In fact this fourth beta includes 140 changes compared to the last beta. Of course stability has been addressed to be rock hard, but also minor changes have made it into this release. Mac fans will be pleased to know that the unified toolbar now matches Snow Leopard, page load up improvements (with asynchronous scripts), support for the HTML 5 File API, and much more.

Add-on developers are encouraged to test this release with their software, especially since the recent changes with regards to stability. Add-ons in Firefox 3.6 have a little less ability to extend the browser to offer greater stability overall, which sounds like a fair trade off. In the future, say Firefox 4 or later, when the multi-process project takes off this might even change the add-ons space even more in many directions (good and bad).

Overall this release looks really solid, and it's definitely a recommended update and download for all Firefox web developers, add-on developers, and users who want to help out make this release unbeatable.

Mozilla has put Firefox on a speed train as only a week after the previous release there is already a beta 3. Not a problem in my opinion, as it shows steady progress to a really solid release.

With 80+ bugs fixed in this release stability is again the main focus. Not surprisingly as Firefox 3.6 is more or less feature complete. Of course these betas aren't as exciting this way, but they'll surely pay off once the final release is here. However there are two changes, of which one is important for add-on developers: changes to how we allow third party software to integrate with Firefox in order to prevent crashes, and the ability to run scripts asynchronously to speed up page load times.

Existing beta users will receive the update automatically, or can trigger it manually though the Help menu. The full download is available from the web page. The final Firefox 3.6 release is planned for the end of this year.

That Firefox 3.6 isn't polished yet is a given. That we're seeing a new beta release so soon is something else. Destined to be released this year Mozilla cranked up a new beta to fix the most important bugs on the road to release candidates.

In this release alone 190 bugs were squashed, while the feature set remained the same compared with the last beta. Of course a new beta does not need new features if your goal is to stabilize it. For Mac users the most prominent fix is the lost of focus bug that plagues Firefox 3.5 in combination with Growl 1.2 (the only release that works on Snow Leopard). However for the rest of the world a lot of top crashers has been fixed, and well it's so much that you'll just have to dig through the bug list yourself.

Firefox 3.6 Beta users will get the update automatically (or through Help > Check for Updates...). If you want you can get the full download from Mozilla's web site.

Sooner than planned, Mozilla released the next maintenance release of Firefox, bringing the version up to 3.5.5. As with all releases, this is a recommend update for all existing Firefox 3.5.x users.

While relatively not an exciting release, some users will welcome it warm heartedly. Firefox 3.5.5 purely exists of stability fixes that were accidentally introduced in the previous update.

Existing Firefox users can update by selecting Help > Check for Updates... if a dialog did not appear automatically. Alternatively you can download the full installer from Mozilla's web site.

With Mozilla increasing the pace of new Firefox releases (3.5 took far too long, and Chrome is racing release out of the door), the first beta of the successor of one of the most popular browsers is here.

As the first number indicates this is a minor upgrade of the current stable release, but nonetheless sports some interesting improvements.

First apparent addition is that of Personas, allowing you to change Firefox with lightweight themes, which do not require a restart of the browser. Personas has been out for a while now as a separate add-on for Firefox 3.x. Unlike normal themes, Personas consist mostly of a new background (image, style) and menus. For different buttons, or more complete changes you're still stuck.

Other changes include a plug-in checker, first seen in the latest Firefox 3.5 builds, full screen support for the native video tag, support for the WOFF font format, support for new web technologies and best of all increased JS performance, start-up time and responsiveness.

Be sure to read the complete release notes before downloading this beta release.