By Sajal Kayan
Jan 21 (THAINDIAN NEWS) Firefox, the flagship product of Mozilla Corporation has released Version 3.6 (codenamed Namoroka) today shortly before 9:00am PST. At the time of writing, just moments after the link went live, the Mozilla website already boasted of 88,900 downloads.

“With new features to customize the way Firefox looks, to keep you safe as you browse and to bring you web pages faster than ever before, Firefox 3.6 is built for the way you use the web.” said Mike Beltzner, Director of Firefox Development in a video posted on Mozilla website and is also available on YouTube.

Our internal tests confirm that pages of Thaindian News as well as other popular websites load significantly faster. The key change noticed by us, is that the rendering of the whole page isn’t stalled, while waiting for other Javascript blocks to finish loading. This is a common problem that most browsers such as Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari and older versions of Firefox routinely face.

“JavaScript alone should be 20% faster in 3.6 than 3.5 and we’ve made a number of other changes as well.”, Gen Kanai, Director of Marketing of Mozilla Japan told Thaindian News.

The increase in the rendering speed of Firefox apparently comes from the ability to run scripts asynchronously to speed up the page load times. This is due to the implementation of async attribute in Gecko 1.9.2. Gecko is the layout engine used by Firefox and the new Firefox version ships with Gecko 1.9.2 .

“I had switched to Google Chrome from Firefox when it was released because of its super fast Javascript execution ability with WebKit, but when I tried Firefox 3.6, I was amazed at the major improvement. The fastest just got faster!”, said Archit Tantia, a web consultant/blogger upon trying the release of Firefox 3.6.

The release couldn’t have come at a better time. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which is infamous for its security vulnerabilities, was recently criticized as it was targeted by Chinese crackers to steal information from various companies including Google. Last week, German government issued a warning against the use of Internet Explorer.

Within the past one month, around 22.28% of visitors to Thaindian News used Firefox, and of these, around 1.22% of the Firefox users were on Version 3.6 (Release Candidate) and about 60% on Version 3.5. On the other hand, 62.24% of our visitors use the rival Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Firefox 3.6 is available for download at http://www.getfirefox.com/.