Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 Released

Mozilla has released Firefox 3.6 beta 3, just 1 week after the previous beta 2.

This is a bug fix beta release, introducing over 90 bug fixes, among which:

• A new API will now allow add-on developers access Firefox’s geolocation features.
• As expected, tab previews on Windows 7 taskbar has been pulled back. This is a real disappointment: there will be no support at all for some of Windows 7’s most welcomed features: jump lists, download progress in the task bar (a la IE8), and now no tab previews.
• In the security/stability front, the Firefox components directory is now locked down, which means no third party provider will be able to write to Firefox’s components folder. More details in Mozilla Developer Center.
• The extensions.checkCompatibility preference becomes less relaxed. In the past, it has been abused by users as a way to force incompatible extensions to work with newer Firefox versions. The preference is still there but it will have to be more explicit. For example to force them to work with Firefox 3.6, you wll have to add extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6 and set it to false. For future versions you will need to set extensions.checkCompatibility.3.7 to false and so on. See Dave Townsend’s post for more details.

Download Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 | Ubuntu users have a PPA which they can use to install the latest Firefox 3.6.