Mozilla has preempted its own official launch with finished versions of Firefox 6 on its FTP server (Linux, Mac OS X, released on Tuesday but, as is becoming the case in Firefox releases, is already online to help coordinate the release. The interval between the FTP posting and the public debut may be to catch any last-minute bugs.
Many of the changes in Firefox 6 are security-focused and reflect Mozilla's new, Chrome-like focus on minor but quick releases over monolithic updates. It now has a permissions manager to more easily control what sites are allowed to track and highlights the root domain to help prevent phishing scams. Deeper HTML5 support, better plugin version checking, and a scratchpad to test small Javascript code segments in-browser are all part of the update.
Firefox 7 is expected to show as soon as six weeks from the release of version 6, with a beta arriving a few weeks before then.
