Firefox 3.6 needs more, better features to compete against Chrome 3

Last April, Mozilla gave the first public indication of the feature set it was planning for the version of Firefox that could be released in the fall of this year. Among them were the following: a thumbnail preview mode for tab switching using Ctrl+Tab; an integrated, if limited, version of the Ubiquity command line tool; live theme changes without reboots; a new and more fully loaded "New Tab" feature; a complete status window that answers to the URL about:me; and integration of the desktop Web application platform Prism.

But in releasing the first public edition of the Firefox 3.6 alpha, code-named "Namoroka," general testers will find none of these features -- at least, not yet. Only in the private nightly builds may some testers begin to see features including Ctrl+Tab preview, but now it's believed that integrated Prism and other features will not make it into the final release.

According to Mozilla's official schedule, whatever front end enhancements the organization will end up making to this particular release, will have to be ready for Beta 1 sometime next month. Meanwhile, testers will have to deal with a 3.6 platform that's slightly faster than Firefox 3.5.2 in some respects, but noticeably slower in others, most likely due to developers' error control code as indicated by Betanews performance tests.

What Firefox aficionados say they love most about the browser compared to Google Chrome -- currently its biggest competition as an alternative to Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 -- is its rich feature set and customizability. Chrome, by contrast, is fairly bare-bones, although its bare chassis can now claim to be nearly twice as fast as Firefox 3.5.2 on Windows XP SP3, the fastest (though arguably the least secure) of Microsoft's three modern operating systems. Although Chrome has demonstrated some fancy windowing functionality, probably as a show of Google's prowess in producing something more resembling an operating system; and last week it adopted something that could be laughably described as "themes", Google's developers are finding buckets full of performance for Dev channel editions on an almost daily basis.

Since Betanews' tests just last Friday, Chrome 3 has clinched nearly one point of performance, and on our Windows XP SP3 physical test platform is now flirting with 20 times the performance of IE7 on Vista, now at a record 19.90 on our XP index. This while Mozilla's public release of Namoroka Alpha 1, on our Windows 7 RTM index slips almost one full point over Mozilla's final Namoroka release candidate, due mainly to visibly slower scores in the general math departments. The latest private daily build of Firefox 3.5.3 "Shiretoko," however, gained back some ground to pull just ahead of the stable 3.5.2.

If a full feature set is the factor that distinguishes Firefox over Chrome, then Mozilla will need to pack as many features from that April wish list as it can cram into Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 and Beta 2 next month.