Mozilla releases Firefox 6

SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Mozilla has released Firefox 6, bringing a host of treats for developers.

Mozilla's third major Firefox release of 2011 offers improvements to performance, security and stability, but it is perhaps web developers that will be most happy with Firefox 6. Mozilla has added support for more HTML5 elements such as progress and tracking, introducing Server Sent Events while bringing back Websockets.

Like all browser developers, Mozilla has worked on tweaking Firefox's document object model (DOM). There's an extensive list of changes, including support for W3C standard touch events.

Firefox 5 users will be prompted to update to Firefox 6, and while there is very little to visually distinguish Firefox 5 from Firefox 6, users will be urged to upgrade. Earlier Mozilla said it was mulling a move to remove version numbers altogether from Firefox's About dialogue box, but Firefox 6 still proudly displays its vintage.

Earlier this week it was widely reported that Mozilla silently released Firefox 6 on its FTP server. However Mozilla told The INQUIRER that the version on its FTP server over the weekend was not the final release build but a version used for quality assurance. This time, however, there was no such mistake, and the outfit is shouting the release from the rooftops.

Mozilla has released Firefox 6 for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. µ