By Sajal Kayan
Jan 20 (THAINDIAN NEWS) Firefox, the flagship product of Mozilla Corporation is all set to release Version 3.6 (codenamed Namoroka) tomorrow - January 21st 2010.

“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.

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 RC2, I was amazed at the major improvement. The fastest just got faster!”, said Archit Tantia, a web consultant/blogger upon trying the Release Candidate of the upcoming release of Firefox 3.6.

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.

From January 21st onwards, Firefox 3.6 will be available for download at http://www.getfirefox.com/.

Video: What’s New in Firefox 3.6