The Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate arrived on Friday, with many users considering it a minor upgrade and screams from some add-on developers.  The improvements come in the way of improved javascript performance, support for the WOFF font format, HTML 5, CSS, DOM web technologies, full screen open and native video and poster frames as well as one stability upgrade that has a few people up in arms.  According to The Register’s story, about 75% of add-ons are ready for the upgrade but we still only know that the finalized version should hit the interwebs before April.

The controversy comes from the decision to lock down the browser’s components directory, ensuring that add-ons cannot change the browser on a basic level.  The reason is that some add-ons have been causing instability and headaches for the FireFox support team.  Another reason they offered El Reg is the unwillingness of users to upgrade their FireFox because of incompatible extensions, though it would seem that those same people would just skip the 3.6 version as well.  We shall see.


“Mozilla has been forced to justify its decision to herd third party coders, whose add-ons sometimes break the Firefox user interface, away form the browser’s components directory.

In a meaty blog post on Saturday, the open source browser maker’s development boss, Mike Connor, explained the rationale behind Mozilla’s move to debut a “lockdown” feature in Firefox 3.6.”

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