Next release of Firefox - 3.6 Namoroka - is taking shape

Since Firefox 3.5 is now out of the door, I have started to play with Minefield again - the daily trunk builds - and the latest release of the trunk code which is marked as 3.6a1pre, is looking very interesting. There are several stated goals for this release, initial browser start speed improvements and also an enhancement to tab speed as well. Well during this very early phase it would appear on Linux that the start speed has definitely been improved, and even with a large number of tabs to open , the browser loads impressively quickly. Also once loaded the response is good, so things are moving in the right direction.

One of the add-ons I always used to install was Firefox showcase, which mimicked operas and chromiums list of open tabs in a window, but this now comes built into firefox 3.6 and it works well. It's not exactly the same, but an improvement over 3.5.

One of the other major objectives is to integrate the browser seamlessly into your operating system of choice, but there are few signs of that as yet. I feel this is going to be tall order with both Gnome and KDE offering different look and feel, but time will tell.

A rich environment for web based applications so that the boundary between the operating system and the browser starts to blur.This is obviously in the to-do pile, as I use a lot of web applications, there doesn't appear on the surface to have been many changes there yet.

Personalization & Customization will allow you to change theme and add-ons, without having to restart the browser, but again this is in the to-do pile.

There are many other improvements marked for this release, and they are not insignificant:
- Better UI (user interface) for uploading files.
- Common site specific preferences to merge with the site button.
- Button to “convert website to application”.
- Implementation of Aero Glass and Aero Peek.
- File management capabilities (move, copy, delete) to be added to the download manager.
- New tab page (we’ve already seen the Cognitive Shield tab concept).
- “about:me” to offer web browsing statistics.
- Identity management.
- Firefox for Mac will use the OS’s native spell checker and will get Keychain and AppleScript support.

You can get more information here :Firefox 3.6