Firefox 6 now in alpha, sports privacy features, more HTML5

Mozilla’s development cycle dictates that three generations of its popular web browser Firefox must be in an active cycle. Thus, Firefox 4 is the current mainstream release (currently at 4.0.1), Firefox 5 has recently entered beta, and that means that Firefox 6, known as Aurora, has just begun its development cycle, now offering a rough alpha release for testing and feedback.

Apart from being in a very unfinished state, the new alpha does show off some new features, including a much-enhanced add-ons manager, new features for Panorama, further support of HTML5, a few new developer tools (including a Javascript code “scratchpad” that allows live testing) and a Permission Manager window (accessible by typing about:permissions in the URL bar) that gives users the ability to set different permissions for every site (if desired), including cookie, pop-up, offline storage and location access settings.

Web developers will find that Aurora offers a number of improvements and new features, starting the Scratchpad but extending to improved networking (using a more recent Websockets), support for HTML5 properties such as “progress” and “track,” fixes for tags like “canvas” and CSS text attributes, along with several other changes.

A quick run-through of a few sites with Aurora showed plenty of speed, along with plenty of rendering errors, and of course most add-ons, themes and other extras do not work with it.

Firefox 6, based on Gecko 6.0, will ship in the third quarter of 2011. This article provides links to information about the changes that affect developers in this release. Nightly builds of what will become Firefox 6 are currently available on the Aurora channel (that is, mozilla-aurora).