Quick specs
Version: 6.0.2
Date added: September 07, 2011
Price: Free
Operating system: Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/7
The bottom line:
Firefox 6 is a worthy expression of Mozilla's ideals. The browser is
competitively fast, sports a new minimalist look, and includes some
excellently executed features. Unfortunately, that describes most of
Firefox's competition, too.
Review:
The second version of Firefox to come under the new rapid-release aegis,
Firefox 6 follows in the footsteps of Google Chrome, which adopted the
rapid-release cycle a while ago and is now up to version 13 (at the time
this review was written) despite having its first release only in 2008.
Firefox 4 had a massive impact on Firefox 5 and now Firefox 6, and so
this review is not dramatically different from its predecessor. Firefox 4
had a rough time in its early development, but those days are over. The
browser that you can download now is in the same speed category as its
competition; offers many similar features (stronger in many areas and
slightly weaker in others); includes broad, cross-platform support for
hardware acceleration and other "future-Web" tech and standards; and is In Firefox 6, you get more incremental updates that generally focus on
making the browser work better. One of the most important improvements
is that the browser now supports Mozilla's new Add-on SDK, formerly
called Jetpack. This foundation lets programmers build extensions out of
Web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript rather than the
older XUL technology. Extensions are expected to be easier to write and
ought not to break when new browser versions arrive, although add-on
developers must still decide whether to rewrite their existing
extensions. The browser supports Mozilla's new Add-on Builder, too,
which should make it easier to create add-ons.
Also under the hood, CSS animation support was turned on in Firefox 5,
which meant that the browser could handle dynamic Web content that moves
around a page more easily. The Do Not Track box was moved to a more
prominent place in the Options menu, under Privacy. It's also now
available in Firefox for Android.
Changes in Firefox 6 include a strong expansion of developer tools,
better memory management for the Panorama tab grouping feature, minor
security tweaks to the interface, and several critical security bug
fixes. See the Features and Support section below for more details.
It's important to point out that there are four versions of Firefox
available at the moment, and this review only addresses the "stable"
branch, intended for general use. Firefox's other channels are Firefox
beta (download for ); Firefox Aurora, analogous to Google Chrome's dev channel (download Aurora for ; and the bleeding-edge, updated-nightly) are respectively progressively less stable versions of the browser, and aimed at developers.
Please note that the First Look video below is still applicable to Firefox 6, as is thiseven though they feature Firefox 4.
Firefox reborn in version 4
Installation
Installing Firefox 6 was a fine, quick experience. Firefox 4 beta users
will find themselves still in the beta channel, which is currently on
version 7. If you were testing Firefox 4 beta and hoped that the update
to Firefox 4 stable or Firefox 5 stable would clean up the 10 months'
worth of beta detritus, which created a new track for each version,
you're out of luck. That's the cost of using a beta.
We mistakenly reported that Firefox 4 didn't include automatic updating
the way that Chrome and Opera do. In fact, it did, as did Firefox 5 and
Firefox 6 does, too. Firefox 6 has gotten significantly faster at
restarting, and the process that used to take several minutes took less
than 1 minute on our test computers. If you're updating from version 3.6
to version 6, the process is likely to take several minutes because of
the significant code changes that have been made.
Careful Firefox observers will notice that the browser no longer ships
with a separate icon for Safe Mode. Simply hold down Shift; when you
click on the Firefox icon to open a box you will be allowed to customize
which settings carry over to Safe Mode.
Firefox automatically installs a Windows 7 taskbar icon if you choose it
as your default browser. Uninstalling the browser does not leave behind
any icons or folders if you choose to remove your settings at the same
time.
Interface
If you're a big Firefox fan, you'd better hope that either you're not
very attached to the version 3.6 look or you're extremely taken by the
new design. The main interface is now completely different from what's
come before, retaining only the larger back button that debuted in
version 3. Not surprisingly, the new design also brings the browser
significantly closer to the minimalist style first adopted by Google
Chrome in 2008, although it looks most similar to Opera 11.
The menu bar has been squished into an orange button on the upper left,
with menu options spread across two columns. Nearly all the submenus
have been redesigned as well, although the hot keys remain the same, so
the learning curve isn't particularly steep. In fact, the menu redesign
makes it much easier to get to bookmarks, add-ons, and history, as they
now all live on one Menu pane. The Menu button is not available to Mac
users, to keep with the Mac OS X theme.
Besides the major changes to the menu, smaller changes have greatly
improved usability. For example, there's now a Get Bookmark Add-ons link
in the Bookmarks submenu. The History submenu now has Recently Closed
Tabs and Recently Closed Windows sections.
Tabs are now on top by default, and while the forward and back
navigation buttons haven't moved, the stop and refresh buttons are now
attached to the right side of the location bar, next to the bookmark
star. When you're typing a URL, the "Go" button appears in green. While
resolving a URL, the box changes from the "Go" arrow to an "X" for the
new Stop button, and the green changes to red. The visual cues are minor
but help to highlight their new location in the interface. Returning
the Stop and Refresh buttons to their Firefox 3.6 locations can be done
via the Customize option. What little color remained in the default
interface, mostly the green Back button, has been leeched out for a
muted gray. You can customize the Firefox skin with the restartless
Personas add-ons, added in Firefox 3.6.
Right of the location bar lives the traditional search box, with its
drop-down list of search engines. Above that on the tab bar there is a
new button that lists all your open tabs, and you can add a button to
access the Panorama tab-grouping feature. If you don't see the button,
you can add it by right-clicking on the interface and choosing
Customize, then dragging and dropping the Tab Groups icon next to the
List All Tabs button. We don't consider many customizations to be
essential, but this one is.
The Status bar that lives at the bottom of the interface is now hidden
by default, again in keeping with the minimalist philosophy and the
competition. There's a new Add-on bar as well, also hidden by default,
to which extension icons can be added if you want to keep add-on icons
easily available but out of the way of the main interface.
One of Firefox's singular strengths is its capacity for customization,
which remains unparalleled and which is accessible even to novice users.
While the competition does offer add-ons and extensions, Firefox
remains far ahead of all of them in interface customization.
Features and support
Firefox 6's features are robust and generally competitive. There is some
minor functionality missing in a few cases where the browser remains
behind the competition, but Firefox is generally one of the most
progressive major browsers available, an early adopter if not always an
innovator.
The most important feature in the modern Firefox is Sync. As with many
recent Firefox features, it started off as a rough add-on, and often
deleted data. If you were scared off by its early bad behavior, you'll
be glad to know that Mozilla has worked out the kinks since version 4.
Sync now smoothly syncs your bookmarks, passwords, preferences, history,
and tabs, not only with other computers, but also with your
To use it, click on the Menu button and choose Set Up Sync from the left
column. That will take you to a window where you can connect an
existing Firefox Sync account or create a new one. Within Firefox Sync,
there are two important security points. One is that Firefox encrypts
your data before sending it over an encrypted connection to its servers,
where it remains encrypted. Mozilla says that the company would not be
able to access it even if somebody there wanted to. The second is that
you have the option of setting up your own personal sync server. In an
age when private data stored by corporations gets hacked and stolen with
shocking regularity, setting up a personal sync server is one way to
ensure that you bear the responsibility for your own data.
Another big feature in Firefox 6 is support for
These add-ons are written differently from standard Firefox add-ons,
and are expected to become the format for add-ons in the future. As
such, not many restartless add-ons exist--only about 250 at the time of
writing this review, compared with the thousands of "standard" add-ons.
However, this is an improvement of more than 100 add-ons since Firefox 4
debuted in March 2011. Add-ons continue to pose a big problem for
Mozilla, as older add-ons become a bottleneck for Firefox that other
browsers, with their newer add-on frameworks, don't have to manage. The
aforementioned Add-on SDK is designed to confront this problem directly.
Firefox 4's add-on manager was completely overhauled, with some tweaks
made in Firefox 5. There's a lot of useful new technology here, as
compared with the version 3.6 manager. Not only can you search for
add-ons from within the add-on window using the search box in the
upper-right corner, you can add them without having to jump to the ,
also known as AMO. The manager calls out the AMO add-on collections,
which you can create more explicitly in the Get Add-ons tab. The add-on
manager also allows you to browse Personas. It's slightly annoying that
clicking on an add-on group or collection opens the page in a new
browser window, whereas clicking on a specific add-on opens that
add-on's download page within the add-on manager. That's a very minor
criticism, though.
Other changes to the add-on manager include forward and back buttons
specific to the manager, in the upper-left corner, and left-side
navigation tabs for specifically focusing on Extensions, Appearance, and
Plug-ins. Meanwhile, two little improvements to the manager will
impress keyboard junkies. There's a new hot key for pulling up the
add-on manager, Control-Shift-A, and you can type "about:addons"
directly into the location bar to access the add-ons manager in a tab.
The tab-grouping feature seems to be suffering a bit of an identity
crisis, though its functionality is unchanged. Originally called Tab
Candy, then renamed Panorama, it presents your tabs as an array of
thumbnail images. The thumbnails reside in rectangular boxes that
constitute a group. Tabs can be dragged from one group to another, and
groups can be named and moved as well. You can add a tab to an existing
group or create a new group by right-clicking on the tab and choosing
Move to Group. The hot-key combo Control-Shift-E will also jump between
the main interface and the Tab Group window.
The overall idea is to make it easier to switch from one tab to another,
to group or regroup related tabs, and to get a global view of what's
going on with your tabs. It's potentially a big improvement in browser
usage, compared with aiming a mouse at an ever-skinnier tab, cycling
through a list with Alt-Tab keystrokes, or pecking at a drop-down menu
to reach the tabs that overflowed off the deep. Firefox 6 changed how
Panorama interacted with the browser's memory management, so that tabs
now load at launch only for the active group.
The bookmarks and history menus have been redesigned, and now the hot
keys open them by default as sidebars. Go through the Menu button to get
the full menus. We were actually quite impressed with the layout of the
menu button options for bookmarks and history, finding it much more
useful with quick access to recently closed tabs and new bookmark tags.
This is probably the most useful in-browser bookmark manager around,
especially if you enable Sync and use it with your Android phone or
tablet.
Another new feature is App Tabs, which reduces the width of a tab to its
favicon and pins the tab permanently on the left. The tab will glow
when updated, a useful indicator for things like Web mail. And when you
start typing into the location bar, one of the search choices will be
related open tabs so that you can quickly switch to an existing tab.
Under the hood there are
tons of changes. The biggest is full
hardware acceleration across all platforms, which means that Firefox
draws on your graphics card to speed up complex rendering. You'll see
dramatic HTML5 support, including for high-definition WebM video, and
broad support for the HTML5 canvas, video, audio, geolocation, drag and
drop, and form tags. OpenType fonts are supported, as are CSS3 and newer
JavaScript values. WebGL and hardware acceleration give the browser a
massive boost, which we'll discuss in the Performance section below.
HTML5 also gets some love in Firefox 6, with improvements and additional
support for the new Window.matchMedia API for Web optimization, and
WebSockets and server-sent APIs for building more-interactive and
responsive real-time Web-based apps and games.
The short version of all this is that Firefox 6 is on the cutting edge
of the next generation of Web standards, and that benefits you immensely
by offering faster rendering times of Web sites that can do more.
A new Web Developer menu in Firefox 6 collates tools for building and
debugging Web sites into one location. These include the new Scratchpad
tool, which browsers like Opera and Chrome have had for some time. It
allows developers to test JavaScript before implementing it. The Web
console feature also has a new autocomplete option and can have its
location customized.
There's a decent list of other, smaller changes to Firefox that are
worth pointing out because they'll enhance your workflow in the browser.
One of these is Switch to Tab. Open a new tab, start typing the name of
an already-open tab, and the URL will appear in the drop-down with
"Switch to Tab" beneath it. Select that one, and the new tab closes and
you're whisked to the preexisting tab. It's a great trick for cutting
down on the amount of time it takes to sift through 45 open tabs, and
removes the chance of accidentally having the same tab open twice or
more.
The location bar--or as Mozilla calls it, the Awesome Bar--retains the
features introduced in Firefox 3.5, such as the options to search your
history and bookmarks and to tap your default search engine to provide
you with quick results. However, the "feeling lucky" instant jump to
what it thinks is the Web site you're most likely to be looking for has
been disabled because of internal Mozilla concerns about accidentally
sending personal information to the search provider.
Private browsing reflects the browser's faster start-up and shutdown
times so that it jumps between standard browsing and Private Browsing
mode significantly faster than in version 3.6.
The new Do Not Track feature indicates via a header notification that
you want to opt out of targeted advertisements. However, it requires
that the Web site you're viewing, and therefore that site's developers,
respect the header itself. While this is great for future-proofing the
Web, as implemented at the time of writing, not many Web sites have
taken notice of it. While that doesn't mean it won't eventually have a
big impact, that time is not now, and it's better to install an add-on
like
Adblock Plus to get more-complete ad-tracking protection.
There are two smaller yet important changes to the way that Firefox
protects you. One is the implementation of the Content Security Policy,
which is designed to block one of the most common types of browser
threats, cross-site scripting attacks, by allowing sites to tell the
browser which content is legitimate. Though CSP also places the burden
on the sites' developers, it's backward-compatible and aimed mostly at
well-known sites hosting immense volumes of data and content.
Another security improvement is the implementation of HTTP Strict
Transport Security (HSTS). This prevents your log-in information from
being intercepted by telling Firefox to automatically create a secure
connection to a site's servers.
The "identity block," the colored left-most section of the URL, has been
given a refresh to better call out the Web site you're on, and the URL
bar itself now changes the text color of the URL you're on so that the
domain is black, for easy identification, while the rest of the URL is
gray. This is a small security change, and one that's been previously
available to people who are comfortable changing their about:config, but
it's definitely a strong visual cue that helps you avoid getting
spoofed.
The new feature set alone makes it worth upgrading to the latest version
of Firefox. While some older Firefox users may feel that these features
add unnecessary bloat to a browser that offers add-ons specifically so
that you can customize your browsing experience, Firefox 4 was actually
dramatically faster than Firefox 3.6, and Firefox 5 continues to perform
well. We address the browser's behavior in the section below.
Performance
As mentioned earlier, Firefox 6's performance has been greatly improved
by the addition of graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware acceleration.
It allows the browser to shove certain rendering tasks onto the
computer's graphics card, freeing up CPU resources while making page
rendering and animations load faster. These tasks include composition
support, rendering support, and desktop compositing.
JavaScript plays a major role in the Web, and Firefox 6's JaegerMonkey
engine combined with the GPU acceleration gives the browser some serious
juice. For a full rundown on Firefox 4 versus Chrome 11 versus Internet
Explorer 9, check out our .
The short version: Firefox 4 came out on top. However, because of
ongoing improvements made in the browser space, especially to Firefox
and Chrome, it wouldn't be surprising to find that the browsers all test
extremely close to each other.
One interesting publicly available benchmark is the new
from Facebook, which looks to test HTML5 in real-world gaming
situations. JSGameBench hasn't posted new results since April 2011, but
the ones it did gave strong marks to the Firefox 4 beta both with and
without . The stable version of Firefox 4 also once it was released.
Note that to effectively use hardware acceleration, you must make sure that your graphics card drivers are up-to-date.
Browser benchmarks are a notoriously fidgety lot, and often come up
against legitimate complaints that they look at too narrow a set of
features--such as checking only JavaScript rendering times. In hands-on
use, at least, Firefox 6 can more than hold its own. It's not clear that
it's enough to counter the past two years of Chrome decisively winning
the fastest-browser PR campaign, but that may no longer be the point.
All five major browsers are now similarly fast at JavaScript tests, and
you may start looking at other criteria to determine which browser is
best for you.
In hands-on experiences, one of the best performance differences between
Firefox 3.6 and the current version is that Firefox 6 crashes far, far
less. That's due in no small part to improvements made to the plug-in
crash protection, which prevents plug-ins like Adobe Flash, Apple
QuickTime, and Microsoft Silverlight from dropping the browser dead. If
one of them crashes, simply reload the page. And while there had been a
vocal minority suffering from memory leaks in Firefox 4.0.1, a fix for
that particular bug was issued in version 5 and it's not expected to be a
continuing problem.
Conclusion
Definitely a worthy heir to the Firefox name, Firefox 6's one major
drawback is that, like its competitors, it uses massive amounts of RAM.
Don't expect that to change as the browser is relied upon to perform
more and more tasks that once occurred in other programs. It will also
be less of a problem as hardware improves.
Firefox 6 faces a challenging field of competition. Some people have
probably abandoned the browser for the significant speed differences
between version 3.6 and Google Chrome. Others might be turned off by
Mozilla's open-armed embrace of the rapid-release cycle, and the
diminishing importance of version numbers. Frankly, we find that a bit
silly, as it's better to get newer features and fixes as soon as they're
ready, instead of waiting for a once-yearly update. Competition has
forced Mozilla and others to put out better browsers in order to thrive,
and we think that Firefox 6 will keep the browser competitive.
