Mozilla Firefox 3.6 is a version of the

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and ...

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

released in January 2010. The release's main improvement over Firefox 3.5 is improved performance (due to further speed improvements in the

TraceMonkey SpiderMonkey is the first JavaScript engine, written by Brendan Eich at Netscape Communications, later released as open source and currently maintained by the Mozilla Foundation. It is used in the Firefox web browser. History Eich "wrote J ...

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

engine). It uses the

Gecko Geckos are small, mostly carnivorous lizards that have a wide distribution, found on every continent except Antarctica. Belonging to the infraorder Gekkota, geckos are found in warm climates throughout the world. They range from . Geckos ar ...

1.9.2 engine (compared to 1.9.1 in Fx 3.5), which improves compliance with

web standards Web standards are the formal, non-proprietary standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of s ...

. It was codenamed '' Namoroka''. In this version, support for

X BitMap In computer graphics, the X Window System used X BitMap (XBM), a plain text binary image format, for storing cursor and icon bitmaps used in the X GUI. The XBM format is superseded by XPM, which first appeared for X11 in 1989. Format XBM files ...

images was dropped. This release marked the beginning of a new

development cycle In software engineering, a software development process is a process of dividing software development work into smaller, parallel, or sequential steps or sub-processes to improve design, product management. It is also known as a software devel ...

for Firefox. As well as receiving major updates, the browser also received minor updates with new features. This was to allow users to receive new features more quickly and the dawn of a new roadmap that reflected these changes. It was superseded by

Firefox 4 Mozilla Firefox 4 is a version of the Firefox web browser, released on March 22, 2011. The first beta was made available on July 6, 2010; Release Candidate 2 (a base for the final version) was released on March 18, 2011. It was codenamed Tum ...

, released the next year, although Fx 3.6 had a prolonged period of use and version 4 had noted user interface changes. Firefox 3.6 is the last major version of an official Firefox release to run on

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

-based

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

es (see TenFourFox for a much-more-recent version of Firefox for

-based computers running

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

). Soon after 4, much less weight was given to major version numbers, with 6 numbers used by September of that year (4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9) compared to 3 in nearly a decade of Firefox development (1, 2 and 3). Firefox versions 4 through 9 had all reached end-of-life status while Mozilla continued supporting Firefox 3.6 with security updates. Coinciding with a proposal to cater to Enterprise users with optional Extended Support Releases beginning in 2012 based upon Firefox 10, Mozilla discontinued support for Firefox 3.6 on April 24, 2012 Upcoming Firefox Support Changes
March 23rd, 2012 with automatic update to Firefox 12 pushed out to compatible devices by June 2012.

Development

Development for this version started on December 1, 2008. The first

alpha Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἄλφα, ''álpha'', or ell, άλφα, álfa) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph , whic ...

of version 3.6 was released on August 7, 2009. The first beta version was released on October 30, followed by Beta 2 on November 10, Beta 3 on November 17, Beta 4 on November 26, and Beta 5 on December 17. Release Candidate 1 was released on January 8, 2010, followed by Release Candidate 2 on January 17. The final version was released on January 21, 2010.

Minor releases

Firefox 3.6.2 was released on March 23, 2010, followed by version 3.6.3 on April 1 which closed some bugs in the

ASLR Address space layout randomization (ASLR) is a computer security technique involved in preventing Exploit (computer security), exploitation of memory corruption Vulnerability (computing), vulnerabilities. In order to prevent an attacker from reli ...

and DEP handling found at the

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contest 2010. The Firefox developers created a new feature called ''Lorentz''. It is named after the

Lorentz National Park Lorentz National Park is a national park located in Central Papua, Indonesia, in the southwest of western New Guinea. With an area of 25,056 km2 (9,674 mi2), it is the largest national park in Southeast Asia. In 1999 Lorentz was declare ...

. A preview version of Lorentz, Firefox 3.6.3plugin1, was made available on April 8, 2010. Betas of Firefox 3.6.4 were made available starting on April 20, 2010. Firefox 3.6.4 was released on June 22, 2010. The Windows and Linux versions incorporate out-of-process plug-ins (OOPP), which isolates execution of plug-ins (Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime and Microsoft Silverlight by default) into a separate process. This significantly reduces the number of Firefox crashes experienced by users who are watching online videos or playing games; the user can simply refresh the page to continue. Mozilla states that 30% of browser crashes are caused by third-party plugins. Support for other plug-ins by default in OOPP and on the Mac OS X platform became available in Firefox 4. Firefox 3.6.6 lengthens the amount of time a plug-in is allowed to be unresponsive to the point before the plug-in quits. Firefox 3.6.7 was a security and stability update that fixed several issues. Firefox 3.6.8 was a security update that was released a mere three days after 3.6.7, to fix another security fault. Firefox 3.6.9, in addition to fixing security and stability issues, introduced support for the X-FRAME-OPTIONS HTTP response header to help prevent

clickjacking Clickjacking (classified as a user interface redress attack or UI redressing) is a malicious technique of tricking a user into clicking on something different from what the user perceives, thus potentially revealing confidential information or ...

. Firefox 3.6.10 was a security and stability update that fixed several issues. Firefox 3.6.11 was a security and stability update that fixed several issues. Firefox 3.6.12 was a security update that fixed a critical security issue. Firefox 3.6.13 was a security and stability update that fixed several issues. Firefox 3.6.14 was a security and stability update that fixed several issues. Firefox 3.6.15 was a stability update that fixed a Java applets issue. Firefox 3.6.16 was a security update that blacklisted a few invalid HTTPS certificates. Firefox 3.6.17 was a security and stability update that fixed several issues. Firefox 3.6.18 was a security and stability update that fixed several issues. Firefox 3.6.19 was a stability update that fixed several issues. Firefox 3.6.20 was a security and stability update that fixed several issues. Firefox 3.6.21 was a security update that blacklisted a compromised HTTPS certificate. Firefox 3.6.22 was a security update that revoked the SSL certificates for " Staten der Nederlanden" due to fraudulent SSL certificate issuance, as well as fixing an error with .gov.uk domain names. Firefox 3.6.23 was a security and stability update that fixed several issues. Firefox 3.6.24 was a security and stability update that fixed several issues. Firefox 3.6.25 was a security and stability update that fixed several issues. Firefox 3.6.26 was a security and stability update that fixed several issues. Firefox 3.6.27 was a security update that fixed several issues. Firefox 3.6.28 is a security and stability update that fixed several issues.

Features

New features for Firefox 3.6 include * Built-in support for

Personas A persona (plural personae or personas), depending on the context, is the public image of one's personality, the social role that one adopts, or simply a fictional character. The word derives from Latin, where it originally referred to a theatri ...

(browser

Graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

themes) * Check and notification of out-of-date plugins * Full-screen playback of

Theora Theora is a free file format, free Lossy compression, lossy video compression format. It is developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis ...

video * Support for the

WOFF The Web Open Font Format (WOFF) is a font format for use in web pages. WOFF files are OpenType or TrueType fonts, with format-specific compression applied and additional XML metadata added. The two primary goals are first to distinguish font file ...

open web font format * Plug-in directory lock down: Plugins may only to be installed using a .xpi file, not through mere copying to the Firefox plugin directory. This breaks older plugins such as the Java Runtime Environment before 6 Update 15,. net framework before 1.2. * Many performance improvements

End of life

Mozilla discontinued support for Firefox 3.6 on April 24, 2012, which at over 27 months of support made it the longest supported version of Firefox, even longer than

Firefox 2 Mozilla Firefox 2 is a version of Firefox, a web browser released on October 24, 2006 by the Mozilla Corporation. Firefox 2 uses version 1.8 of the Gecko layout engine for displaying web pages. The release contained many new features not found ...

which had over 26 months of total support itself. The underlying Gecko 1.9.2 engine continued to be used, with updates, in Camino.

References

External links

Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Release Notes

Mozilla Firefox 3.6.28 Download link (FTP)

Mozilla.com
Mozilla Firefox homepage for

end-users In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ultimately use a product. The end user stands in contrast to users who support or maintain the product, such as sysops, system administrat ...