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What is New in Mozilla Firefox 3.5?

By Amarendra Bhushan for CEOWORLD Magazine Updated:July 1, 2009

A new version of the Internet open source browser Firefox 3.5 was released on Tuesday, offering users more speed and privacy and greater compliance with new Internet video standards.

Mozilla, the organization that distributes the open source browser, said the new version is twice as fast as the previous version, and also includes a “private browsing” feature, also called “porn mode,” that allows users to hide their tracks when the option is turned on.

Mozilla’s release comes in the same month as the launch of Apple’s Safari 4, which, running on Java-Script, had claimed the title of “world’s fastest browser”.

While Microsoft introduced 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.

Mozilla’s Firefox 3.5 browser had been downloaded more than 2 million times by late afternoon, Pacific time, according to a company counter.

Firefox 3.1 was originally planned as a completion release to get in some features that didn’t make it for Firefox 3 like new tab switching, private mode and video, but in the end it took a purpose of its own, prompting a version push to Firefox 3.5 and extending the originally targeted last year’s end release to mid-2009. But I find it completely worth it. I’ve been using 3.5 since the betas as my main browser (about 8 months now) and have to say I just don’t remember when was the last time it crashed.

Firefox 3 retirement starts today at update number 11 (3.0.11), and according to Mozilla policies it will go out of support six months from now, on December 31, 2009. But with 80% of add-ons ready and a very nice set of new features and performance gains it’s hard to justify not upgrading now.

Download Firefox v3.5

Visit the official website http://getfirefox.com/to grab Firefox 3.5.

Windows: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.5&os=win&lang=en-US

Mac OS X: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.5&os=osx&lang=en-US

Linux: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.5&os=linux&lang=en-US

Firefox 3.5 is available for immediate download in English and more than 70 other languages.

Let’s take a look at what’s new in Firefox 3.5.

Performance

Performance-wise, this release is significantly faster that Firefox 3 running web applications, thanks to the introduction of TraceMonkey, a technology that allows just in time JavaScript compilation for faster execution. Despite these improvements however, Chrome currently holds the crown for speed with better results in the main JavaScript performance tests, thanks in part to its V8 JavaScript engine.

More coolness

In the accessibility front, Firefox 3.5 exposes text formatting such as alignement and font weight, as well as the new audio and video play controls are exposed to assistive technologies via AT-SPI and IAccessible2 attributes properties which is well interpreted by popular screen readers Orca, NVDA, and JAWS, and it work in rich text areas like Gmail compose area, easying the task for people with visual disabilities.

Privacy

A new private mode is now available from the Tools menu. Whatever you visit, search, or download is cleared as soon as you return to normal mode or exit Firefox, including cookies, passwords, and web forms.

A new icon:

The new icon features a stronger 3D look with deeper shadows over the globe, and flames actually surrounding the globe, it also adds detail t othe hand and snout and furrier snout and ears.

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