First beta version of Firefox 3.6 finally released

According to Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, and Mozilla loyalist Chris Blizzard, Firefox 3.6 boasts many improvements over previous versions such as Personas (which lets people customize the browser appearance), better browser responsiveness, and faster startup time.

Users of Firefox 3.6 will also be able to drag and drop files from the computer to the browser. This is useful for uploading files to Web sites, as will a feature not in the beta but planned for the final version, support for the multiple-file input tag so more than one file can be added in Web forms. The new web browser is also fitted with the ability to detect the computer's orientation for machines that offer accelerometer support.

Version 3.6 is also capable of viewing videos built into Web pages with the HTML5 "video" tag in full-screen mode.  There is also expanded support for geolocation technology so it can provide a Web site with an approximate physical address of the user, not just latitude-longitude coordinates.

A new and improved version of the vastly popular Firefox will certainly set the alarm bells ringing for rival browsers like Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Google's Chrome as Mozilla intends its Firefox to remain the world's most popular web browser.

Mozilla launched the alpha version of Firefox 3.6 back in August and it expects to release the final version by the end of the year, with Firefox 3.7 in the first half of 2010 and Firefox 4.0 in about a year.