Mozilla has announced the availability of the first Firefox 3.6 beta release. Ars tests the new version, which introduces support for fullscreen video and lightweight theming.

By Ryan Paul | Last updated November 3, 2009 8:13 AM CT

Mozilla announced the availability of the first Firefox 3.6 beta last week. Firefox 3.6, codenamed Namoroka, is an incremental update that introduces a handful of new features, enhanced performance, and some noteworthy improvements to Web standards support. The final version of Firefox 3.6 could be released next year.

We first looked at Firefox 3.6 in August when we tested the first alpha release. It has some excellent performance improvements under the hood that will boost JavaScript execution speed. Firefox 3.6 also brings some nice CSS enhancements, including support for some useful non-standard features like WebKit's gradients.

Several important new features have been added since the original alpha version. Mozilla recently introduced support for the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) which was developed by type designers Tal Leming and Erik van Blokland in collaboration with Mozilla. Firefox 3.6 will also expand on the work that Mozilla did with the HTML 5 video element in 3.5. Video poster frames and fullscreen playback are now supported. [Ars Technica...] [Comments...]