This weekend saw the pre-release candidate for Mozilla Forefox 3.6 hit the virtual shelves allowing web developers and surfers alike to sample the new features of what’s come.

So what’s new?

Sadly, the much-anticipated multi-core enhancements that Firefox has been distinctly lacking (even IE8 managed to pip them to this post) will have to wait yet again till version 3.7 – as they are not present in this release.

Improved JavaScript performance is highly emphasized, and a test of the v8 benchmark confirmed a highly impressive 26% increase of performance. More than I originally expected. Still, both scores were dwarfed by Chrome running the same benchmark which scored many times higher. All 3 tests were performed on an i5 quad core iMac, running Snow Leopard with 4 GB of RAM.

The plugin architecture is also more secure, new HTML 5 technologies such as full-screen native video and the HTML 5 file API are also present, although to exactly what level they are implemented is still uncertain.

Apparently some 75% of existing plugins are already compatible with 3.6, so there is little reason to stop most people having a play around to see whats new. I certainly didn’t have any problems with the web developer toolkit, firebug or every iPhone developers trusty steed – SQLite manager.

Also, the auto update feature will bring the beta in line with the final release as changes are made.

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