San Francisco — Mozilla yesterday released Firefox 3.5, introducing the latest version of the world’s second-most popular open-source Web browser, spreading delight into the hearts of children and adults alike — tete-a-tete with current browsing technology and trends, intensifying the battle between competing browsers that is dramatically increasing the speed with which web pages are viewed.
Yet, it is by no means the leap ahead than its predecessor Firefox 3 was, and it is clear that the competition is not fading away anytime soon.
In addition to displaying a fancy revised icon by the Iconfactory, Firefox 3.5 delivers several new features to the program, including support for HTML5 video and audio content embedded directly on a page, a private browsing mode, and location-aware browsing, which allows you to share your location with Web sites if you so choose.
The 3.5 version of the Firefox, available for Windows, Windows Portable, Mac, or Linux, released to the public yesterday, with a capability of loading web pages more than twice as fast as its 3.0 predecessor, nevertheless represents the best Firefox has ever been released from Mozilla, thanks to advances in JavaScript, the scripting language.
The pace of innovation has not been matched since Microsoft’s Internet Explorer fought with Netscape’s browser for domination a decade ago. This release comes as no surprise, going through a rigid testing process that involved four beta builds, three release candidates, and a version change to reflect what Mozilla described as the originally-unintended breadth of the improvements being made, most of the new features are no surprise, either.
“It really is Browser Wars 2,” says Jeffrey Hammond, an analyst covering web applications and services for Forrester Research.
“It is certainly the most innovative period since the late 90s. The technology is shifting, the types of apps are shifting, the web is going real-time and we are seeing a tremendous amount of experimentation.”
Specifically, the company now exhibits the following improvements:
- Speed: Arguably the biggest improvements in Firefox 3.5 are performance-based — its the new JavaScript engine. It is called TraceMonkey, and is more than twice as fast as Firefox 3, and ten times faster than Firefox 2, an important step forward, but the main payoff here is increased browsing speed. The software also incorporates the latest version of the Gecko rendering platform, which brings faster rendering of onscreen content.
- Better Video: Up until now, your browser could not play video on its own. That is why a Flash plugin or soemthing is always required. The new Firefox plays video within the browser itself–which means Web producers can do more with the video, such as include links within the video itself, manipulate the image while you are viewing it, or have it react to incoming data.
- Private Browsing: Earlier available to IE users as InPrivate, Chrome users as Incognito, and Safari users as, well, Private Browsing, finally made its way to a public version of Firefox. Like Safari and IE8, Firefox 3.5 now has a private-browsing mode that keeps no trace of sites you visit while it is enabled. It has been available to the 800,000 or so beta testers since December 2008. If you are not familiar with it, users can switch on or off the browser’s history, cookies, and other browsing traces at will via the Tools menu or CTRL+SHFT+P. Though Mozilla has taken it a step further, with its new “Forget This Site” feature. With that, you can click a button and everything from that site–cookies, page history, cached pages, passwords–gets cast to the four winds.
- Location Aware Browsing: What has made many mobile apps so compelling is their ability to marry your geographic information with the rest of the Internet. Firefox 3.5 does a similar thing on your computer at home (or when you are on the road). Web sites can determine your location and then, like a smartphone, serve up relevant info about where you are.
While Microsoft announced many new features with the launch of Internet Explorer 8 in March, it is viewed as lagging behind its competitors in moving towards standards known as HTML 5.
A free download for all, Firefox 3.5 is available in more than 70 different languages. The program runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. The Mac version requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later, any Mac with an Intel-based or G3, G4, or G5 processor, and at least 128MB of RAM.
Click here to download Firefox 3.5, here to track the number of current downloads, and here to take a tour of its new features.