Most of you may be aware that Firefox too shifted to a rapid release cycle like chrome to release new versions regularly this year. Firefox 5 was the first in that release cycle. Firefox 6 beta is now available officially from the Mozilla team and anyone can download it from the official servers.

Some of the major highliss of this release is an improved Add-ons Manager  which checks if your plugins are up-to-date directly, reduced browser startup time by only loading saved tab groups when you use Panorama and Improved Address Bar which highlights the domain name of the website you’re visiting to make it easy to identify where you are online.

The last feature of highlighting the domain name of the website is already available in Internet explorer 9 and glad to see that even Firefox adopted this feature.

New in this release for Windows, Mac and Linux:

  • Add-ons Manager with Plugin Check: Check that your plugins are up-to-date directly from the Add-ons Manager
  • Improved Panorama Groups: Reduces browser startup time by only loading saved tab groups when you use Panorama
  • Improved Address Bar: Highlights the domain name of the website you’re visiting to make it easy to identify where you are online
  • Streamlined site identity block
  • The Scratchpad: Quickly build and test JavaScript snippets in the browser
  • Support for Web Sockets with a prefixed API
  • Moveable Web Console
  • New Web developer-specific menu
  • Window.matchMedia API
  • Support for server-sent events

New in this release for Android:

  • New initial experience: Firefox starts faster and uses less memory. Get to your home page quickly and discover browser features on the side panels.
  • Higher-quality image scaling: View crisp Web pages and images with less pixelation
  • Enhanced Firefox experience on large screen tablets
  • Improvements to the form helper on Android
  • Fresh visual style on Gingerbread OS
  • Optimization for pages that use right to left layout rendering, e.g. in Hebrew and Arabic
  • Touch Events for better interaction with Web pages
  • IndexedDB allows Web pages to store data offline for faster access
  • Automatic text hyphenation

Keep in mind that Firefox for android may not be available for all the Mobiles or android devices as it requires minimum hardware. So if you cant find Firefox in Android market for your device, it means your device cannot run it.

You can download Firefox 6 beta here.

Via: Mozilla Blog