Firefox 3.6 adds performance and some nice new touches

As the battle for functionality rages between Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome and Opera on the Linux desktop, the features list and performance improvements just keep coming. The latest version of the javascript engine in FF 3.6 offers a supposedly 15% increase, and it does indeed seem faster on my Dell XPS 1330 with Ubuntu 9.10 64bit version.

One of the nice new touches you can have with the latest releases of the 3.6 version of Firefox is the tab preview window, see the picture below. Now at the moment there is not an easy way to turn this on, but just follow these simple steps.

1) open a new tab with CTRL-T and type in the address bar about:config

2) Press the "I'll be careful" button

3) Type this into the selection bar - "browser.ctrlTab.previews"

4) Double click on the item when it appears to turn it from false to true - it will enbolden.

5) Re-start Firefox

6) Press CTRL-TAB to see your tab previews.

This is similar to the nice feature in Chromium that you see when you open a new tab, Opera also offers a tab preview by dragging the tab window.

Give the Beta a try and see what you think.


Firefox 3.6 tab preview enabled