Firefox 6 Arrives With New Tools for Web Developers

Firefox 6 is now available. This update to the popular open source web browser comes just eight weeks after Firefox 5 was unveiled. The quick turnaround time and increasing version numbers are part of Mozilla’s new rapid release cycle.

You can grab the latest version of Firefox from the Mozilla downloads site or head to the About Firefox menu and apply the update.

Firefox 6 doesn’t bring any huge changes to the table, despite what the version number bump might imply (and in fact Mozilla is planning to hide the version number so future releases will just be "Firefox"), but it is up to 20 percent faster than Firefox 5.

The most noticeable change to the look of Firefox 6 is the move to a Chrome-style URL bar where the domain name is now darker than the rest of the URL. Firefox 6 doesn’t dispense with the HTTP prefix the way Chrome does, but Firefox 7, which will soon move from the Aurora to the Beta channel, will hide the http:// portion of the URL.

Firefox 6 does include some nice new tools for web developers. Scratchpad is a new JavaScript editor that’s well worth checking out, and the Web Console panel has also been improved.

For a complete list of everything that’s new in Firefox 6, check out the extensive release notes.

source: http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/08/firefox-6-arrives-with-new-tools-for-web-developers/