Firefox 6, also referred to as Aurora, has just begun its development cycle and a rough alpha release is now available for testing and feedback. As with any alpha, it is in a very unfinished state at this point, but there are some notable new features that are included.

Those new features include new features for Panaorama, enhanced HTML5 support, new developer tools, improved add-ons manager and new permission manager window. The permissions manager is interesting in that it will allow users to give different sites varying amounts of permissions for cookies, pop-ups, offline storage and location access, giving users greater privacy controls. Whilst developers will likely be impressed with new features including a ‘Scratchpad’ that allows them to build and test JavaScript snippets on a site.

You may be scratching your head wondering why Aurora has gone into alpha when it was only in the past week or so that Firefox 5 went into Beta – that is all due to Mozilla’s development cycle where three major versions must be in active development at any one time. As a result, Firefox 4 is the mainstream and stable release build whilst version 5 is in Beta and now version 6 is in development as an alpha (or Aurora) build. You can download the Firefox 6 alpha here.

[Via Electronista]