With the new Firefox 3.6 Release candidate coming up, things are getting pretty hot in Firefox arena. Firefox 3.5, even though it has clocked millions of downloads, has caused disappointment amongst its users.

If the pre-release hype created a lot of expectations, the final version, certainly left a bad taste amongst users, with its lack of compatibility with many extensions and then too, it was stated to be slower than the previous version, namely Firefox 3.0.x.

In this context, Firefox fans will, no doubt be much eager to get their hands on the RTM of Firefox as soon as possible. And for those who have not followed the alpha, beta builds, which have been dragged for well over a year, here is what you can expect from the new version of Firefox, which probably can be expected to release soon, now that it has entered the release candidate stage.

New Gecko 1.9.2 rendering engine:

It’s the main part, which is actually responsible for creating the layout of the webpage. A faster engine means, faster processing of data / scripts and lesser time taken to view the page.

Personas - no-restart theming functionality:

It aims to provide, light weight themes, which can changed without having to restart firefox, which is what needs to be done now, to changes themes.

Keeping plug-ins up to date:

It has a new notification systems, which provides information on out-of date plug-ins, so that user can keep their plug-in updated, thus avoid performance, security issues.

HTML 5 Improvements

The HTML 5 is a new standard for developing web pages and displaying them. It adds new features such as Offline storage, canvas drawing, native video and audio streaming support, geo-location, smarter forms , web application focus.

Strict extension compatibility checking

This may not count as a feature in the exact sense, but apparently it is aimed at users who blindly bypass extension compatibility checking.

Look at the following guide to bypass it at your risk : How To Force Extension Compatibility with Firefox 3.6+ - the How-To Geek