The one thing I hate about Firefox is the requirement to restart the browser when installing new extensions and themes, this is pretty much similar to earlier versions of Windows, where small registry changes required users to restart the browser.

Firefox 3.5 is in the works and should be released sometime in June, but discussions about the next version of Firefox which will be codenamed Namoroka and tagged as version 3.6, will do away with this problem altogether.

Several new features have been planned for the newer version of the browser, some of the most exciting one’s include:

• Performance: get a perceivably better browser startup and tab creation times (reduced in at least 50ms), and improve overall responsiveness by adding animations for actions like tab creation, moving, bookmarking, etc.
• Theme and extensions activation without restarting the browser, though this feature may not be supported fully.
• Better user interface and file uploading.
• Merging of common site specific preferences with the site button.
• A option to convert web apps into desktop web apps, this feature already exists in the form of Mozilla Prism.

There are several more interesting features planned out for Firefox 3.6, however the release cycle make take up 10 more months after the release of Firefox 3.5, so users can expect it somewhere around May 2010, definitely a really long way from now.

[via Mozilla Links]