The support for Firefox in our cross browser and functional testing tool now includes 3.0, 3.5 and 3.6.

We’re working on a version for 4.0 and will be releasing it soon.

We’ve applied the latest versions of Firefox to our Cloud Testing agents, so you can now run all your functional and cross browser testing with the latest versions.

Security Advisories Fixed in Firefox 3.6.8:

MFSA 2010-48 Dangling pointer crash regression from plugin parameter array fix

From http://www.mozilla.org/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefox36.html

Firefox 3.6.6 modifies the crash protection feature to increase the amount of time that plugins are allowed to be non-responsive before being terminated.

Mozilla yesterday released a beta version of the Firefox 3.6 browser to fix several stability and security issues.

Firefox 3.6.2 has been released to Mozilla’s beta tester community, and includes several bug fixes such as crashes when using Adobe’s ClickMap add-on. Other problems reported by some users, such as there being no prompt to update extensions for the browser when Firefox was upgraded, have been fixed in the new version.

The beta isn’t aimed at all surfers, though changes will eventually be implemented in the full, stable version of Firefox 3.6.

You can download the Firefox 3.6.2 beta from the Mozilla website.

Firefox 3.6 was launched in January, with Firefox being the second-most popular browser after Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, though Microsoft’s dominance of the browser market is already being eroded after it was forced to offer everyone using it’s operating system the chance to switch to another browser – Opera has already reported a rise in the number of people using its browser as a consequence.

We keep an active check on the browsers that our visitors use, mainly for interest, but today is the first day that there have been no visitors at all using Firefox 2.0.

We guess that in general if you’ve chosen Firefox, you keep up to date (assuming all your favorite add-ins work in the new version).

We still support Firefox 2.0 as part of our cross browser testing service, but are also seeing a drop off of people using it for testing their websites.

Version 3.6 has already risen to 21%, 3.5 is still 42% (probably people waiting for the add-ins to be updated) and 3.0 comes in at 4% – the next one to bite the dust we suspect.

There is a workaround or trick that you can use to get round this.

Warning!

It involves editing the configuration and settings of your Firefox browser, so be careful – you  have been warned.

Step 1

In the address bar of Firefox, enter about:config

You will then be show a list of current settings and configuration.

Step 2

You will need to add a new Preference, called extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6b, which is done by right clicking on the list of preferences and selecting New then Boolean.

Enter the new preference (extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6b) then click OK.

You will now asked to choose a value – select false (to disable checking).

If you want to re-enable checking, you can simply use the Toggle feature (as shown on the right click context menu above) to switch between false and true.

Note:

Previous to 3.6 Beta 3, the generic property extensions.checkCompatibility was used, however it now uses specific versions 3.6b in this case.

Step 3

You will now need to restart Firefox for the changes to take place.

Step 4

If you view the Add-ons dialog, you will be warned that checking is disabled.

You will now be able to use Selenium IDE with Firefox 3.6

Note:

When an updated version of Selenium IDE is available, you should:

a) download and install the new version

b) re-enable compatibility checking.

Beta 4 of the 3.6 version of Firefox has been released. It includes 140 fixes compared to Beta 3. For information on what the 3.6 beta 4 update, are available at the release page.

Firefox 3.6 Beta is built on Mozilla’s Gecko 1.9.2 web rendering platform, which has been under development for several months and contains many improvements for web developers, Add-on developers and users. This version is also faster and more responsive than previous versions, and has been optimized to run on small device operating systems such as Windows CE and Maemo.

• Changes to how we allow third party software to integrate with Firefox in order to prevent crashes.
• The ability to run scripts asynchronously to speed up page load times.
• More than 140 bug fixes from the last beta to improve performance, stability, security and features.
• This beta is available in more than 60 languages – get your local version.
• Users can now change their browser’s appearance with a single click, with built in support for Personas.
• Firefox 3.6 will alert users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
• Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster frames.
• Support for the WOFF font format.
• Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.
• Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.

Developers can find out about all the changes and new features at the Mozilla Developer Center.

To functional testing of your website or for cross browser compatibility testing of your website, why not use Cloud Testing.