Being the FireFox Regional Leader, I'm excited as Mozilla has launched the official release of Firefox 3.5, the next major version of its popular open source Web browser. The new version boosts performance, introduces useful new features, and delivers strong support for emerging Web standards.Firefox 3.5 finally appears, after four beta versions and three release candidates, Firefox 3.5 has finally been released. The new version brings a private browsing mode, faster JavaScript performance, and support for emerging HTML 5 standards.Download the new version of Firefox for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux from Getfirefox.com.
Mozilla aims to "upgrade the Web" by improving the Firefox user experience and expanding the range of tools that are available to Web developers. The company boasts that Firefox 3.5 includes over 5,000 enhancements that span nearly every aspect of the browser's functionality and behavior. Among the most compelling advancements in this release is support for the HTML 5 video element, which enables native video playback in the browser without requiring proprietary plugins such as Flash.
“So much is happening on the Web right now, it’s a great time for browsers. Firefox 3.5 brings together the most innovative Web technologies and delivers them in the most complete and powerful modern browser,” said John Lilly, chief executive of Mozilla, in a statement.
Mozilla was planning to adopt a more incremental development model and tentatively aimed to have a 3.1 release ready to ship in late 2008. As the roadmap increased in complexity and more sophisticated features began to land, they pushed the planned release date back into Q2 2009 and changed the target version number to 3.5. That version arrived this morning, after 1 year of intensive development. That really explains why we could expect a BIG product improvement this time.
For many people, the browser wars are all about one thing: speed. There's no doubt that version 3.5 of Firefox is significantly faster than version 3. Pages load noticeably more quickly for a number of reasons, not least because Mozilla built a new JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey for Mozilla Firefox 3.5.
How much faster is open to debate. Mozilla says it ran the industry-standard SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, which measures how quickly browsers render JavaScript, on versions 2, 3 and 3.5 of Firefox, and asserts that Mozilla Firefox 3.5 is more than twice as fast as Firefox 3 and more than 10 times as fast as Firefox 2 on the test. Other testers have reported similar results.
Of course, rendering JavaScript quickly doesn't necessarily mean that all web pages load faster. Microsoft, for example, argues that for most web pages, other kinds of speed-ups are more important than rendering JavaScript quickly. We'll leave that debate to Microsoft, Mozilla and other browser makers. But putting aside any speeds-and-feeds specs, we can tell you that from the user experience, Mozilla Firefox 3.5 is lightning fast - it seems to me about comparable to the recently-released Apple Safari 4 for the Mac.
3.5 also includes a lot of features that were originally planned for 3.0 but were deferred for various reasons. Let’s walk through all the new Improvements you will see in Firefox 3.5 and what each of them could mean to you.
Features :
1. Privacy
Firefox 3.5 includes a new private browsing mode that allows users to traverse the Web without leaving behind a trail that can be recalled later in the browser’s history, cache, and cookies. This feature is becoming nearly ubiquitous in mainstream browsers as it is already included in Safari, Chrome, and Internet Explorer 8. Mozilla’s implementation is reasonably reliable and appears comparable to its competitors.
It’s largely similar to its counterparts in Chrome, IE, and Safari, except that Firefox closes all your open tabs when you begin to browse privately, then restores them when you’re done. It’s a logical way to demarcate things, and probably helps remind you to leave private mode when you’re finished, although reloading your tabs can take a while if you’re as much of a tab freak as I am.
To use Private Browsing, Select Tools, Start Private Browsing, or else press Ctrl-Shift-P. Unlike with Internet Explorer, a new instance of the browser doesn't launch. Instead, a warning appears, asking you if you want to start a Private Browsing session and telling you that Firefox will save your tabs if you want to start one.
One downside is that the browser doesn't provide a convenient way to perform private browsing alongside a regular browsing session. Google's Incognito mode, which enforces privacy on a per-window basis, doesn't suffer that particular limitation. If you have a lot of tabs open, waiting for your regular session to reload at the end of private browsing in Firefox 3.5 can be a bit painful.
None of these browsers’ privacy features are exactly foolproof–the video-downloading feature in RealPlayer, for instance, helpfully keeps on logging all of the videos on pages you visit even when you’re in a privacy mode. Keep that in mind if you’re paranoid about keeping your online wanderings under wraps.
A new “Forget About This Site” option is a sort of retroactive form of Private Browsing that lets you remove evidence you’d visited a site after the fact. But it’s pretty buried: I could only find it by pulling up the History browser, then right-clicking on a page.
Rather than making erasing your browser’s cookies, cache, and other items an all-or-nothing affair, version 3.5 lets you delete changed for just the past hour, two hours, four hours, or day. Only Chrome does something similar, but its time frames are less useful, since the smallest one is “last day.”
The new version of Firefox has some nice interface tweaks as well. Primary among them is Mozilla Firefox 3.5's ability to re-open tabs or windows that you've previously closed - functionality that was previously available only through add-ons.
Select History and look for two items at the bottom of the menu - Recent Closed Tabs and Recently Closed Windows. From those menu items, select the tab or window you want to re-open. Note that this works only for tabs and windows you've closed in your current browsing session. After you end a session, you won't be able to restore them.
Mozilla Firefox 3.5 also supports watching video and listening to music directly in a web page, without having to launch any plug-ins, by supporting the HTML 5 audio and video elements. The web page itself plays the video, and includes audio and video controls. You can even download the video or audio by right-clicking and saving it.
For all of this to work, though, the elements have to be in the page itself, which means the developer has to code it that way. At the moment, there are very few pages that contain these kinds of video and audio elements; only time will tell whether they become popular.
Mozilla Firefox 3.5 has taken a page from Google Chrome, letting you drag a window out of a browsing session and launch it as its own browsing session, or else drag a tab from one browser session into another to combine them. In addition, when you drag a tab to reposition it among other tabs, you see a thumbnail of the tab as you move it.
Mozilla Firefox 3.5 now also supports what is called Location Aware Browsing, which tells websites your location so that they can deliver geographic-relevant information for online maps or to help when you're searching for local information and businesses.
It works like this: Firefox finds your IP address, gathers information from any nearby Wi-Fi hot spots, and sends that to Google Location Services (its geolocation service provider), which then tries to determine your location and shares that information with the website you're visiting. All this happens only if you give Mozilla Firefox 3.5 permission; Mozilla claims that it's done in a way that protects your privacy.
Mozilla Firefox 3.5 also supports downloadable fonts, and CSS support has been improved. And the "Awesome Bar," which is Firefox's name for the Address Bar, has gotten a slight change that power tweakers will appreciate: You can now more easily filter results as you type text into the bar. So, for example, if you want to see results only from your bookmarks, use the * character (as in Gralla*); if you want results only from tags, use the # character (e.g., Gralla#).
Note to current Firefox users: As with previous Firefox updates, some of your add-ons, such as Google Gears, might not work until they are updated to work with version 3.5.
3. Performance Boost
Now this is the key area where market value increases. Firefox 3.5 brings a significant improvement to JavaScript performance. The browser was fitted with a new JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey that uses an innovative optimization technique to deliver significantly faster execution speed.
It leverages Adobe’s nanojit, the just-in-time (JIT) compiler and native code generator that Adobe built for Flash’s ActionScript virtual machine and released as open source in 2006.
Tracing optimization, which was originally demonstrated by researchers on top of the Lua runtime, has been found to be remarkably effective for boosting performance of dynamic programming languages. The tracing system analyzes the path of execution at runtime and generates compiled code that can be used when that path is reached again. This makes it possible to flatten loops and nested method calls into a linear stream of instructions that will be easier to accelerate with more conventional optimization methods.
The TraceMonkey engine makes JavaScript noticeably faster in Firefox 3.5, enabling developers to leverage client-side scripting for computationally intensive tasks. Mozilla believes that this will open the door for creating a whole new class of sophisticated Web applications that will be able to compete with desktop applications.
High-performance JavaScript engines that are capable of achieving similar or better execution speed are already being used in Safari and Chrome.4.
New standard support: HTML 5, Video
Mozilla is aiming to empower Web developers and expand the scope of what can be accomplished with native Web technologies by adopting emerging standards. The HTML 5 specification is still in the draft process and has not yet been fully ratified by W3C, but some of its most significant features are already being widely adopted by browser vendors.It was originally hoped, way back in 2007, that the feature would be included in Firefox 3, but it did not mature quickly enough and was pushed back to Firefox 3.5. The implementation is relatively good and performance is mostly acceptable.
Firefox 3.5 ships with built-in Ogg Theora and Vorbis video codecs, which will enable video in those formats to play without requiring any external software components.
In order to reduce the risk of fragmenting the Web and disenfranchising some users, Mozilla has refrained from supporting other video formats.
The rendering engine has gained support for natively drawing CSS drop shadows behind text and boxes. Another nice rendering engine enhancement is support for downloadable fonts, making it possible to display text content with fonts that the user doesn’t already have installed on their computer. CSS transforms are supported too, making it possible to rotate and skew page elements. This feature has been used experimentally to simulate isometric 3D rendering. In the following image, a playable video and selectable text are rendered on page elements that are skewed with CSS transforms to look like cube planes:
A new geolocation API has been introduced to support development of location-aware Web application development. This feature was initially introduced last year as an extension and is now a built-in part of the browser. When the geolocation API is used, the browser will prompt the user and ask permission to convey information about the user’s location to the Web application. If the user agrees, the Web application can use the coordinates of the user to present content that is relevant to the region or to perform specialized action based on the user’s position. This feature is supported by several backends. If a hardware GPS device is not available, it will attempt to detect nearby WiFi access points and match those against a location using a database that is maintained by Google. In cases where that is not possible, it will try to guess the user’s location based on their IP address.
6. Tear-Off TabsTabs work better in Firefox 3.5 than in previous versions of the browser. Besides being able to rearrange the tab order, you can drag tabs off the toolbar and drop them either onto another Firefox window (to move the tab to that window), just as you could with Firefox 3.0. In Firefox 3.5, you can also drag a tab onto your desktop to create a new window containing that tab.
This feature is not unique to Firefox 3.5. Both Chrome and Safari include the same functionality, and aesthetically their implementations may be a bit smoother. For example, if you drag tabs around in Safari or Chrome, the tabs rearrange in real time, whereas in Firefox you'll get a marker indicating where the tab will go when you release the mouse button. In terms of functionality, though, Firefox's tear-off tabs work just as you'd expect them to.
Another subtle improvement to tabs is the addition of a small plus-sign (+) button on the tab bar, which makes creating a new tab a little more intuitive.
7. Memory footprint now smaller
As experienced FireFox users will know, the browser has always used way too much memory when it’s running. In 3.5, Mozilla claim that this has been addressed and that FireFox now has a much smaller memory footprint. This is especially good news for users of netbooks or machines where memory is at a premium.
8. Speed
In many ways, today’s browser race really is a race: The single biggest trend in recent browser updates is an emphasis on speed. More specifically, an emphasis on optimizing JavaScript, the programming language that’s used on virtually all Web sites and which gives sophisticated Web apps such as Gmail much of their power. For Firefox 3.5, Mozilla created a new JavaScript engine, which it calls TraceMonkey. I used the industry-standard SunSpider benchmark, and found that TraceMonkey is zippy–2.6 times faster than the old Firefox JavaScript engine, essentially tied with Safari for second place, and just a smidge behind Google’s Chrome 2.0.
Here are SunSpider results for Firefox 3.5, Firefox 3.0, Internet Explorer 8, and the newest Chrome and Opera betas–they’re the average of three passes performed on a Lenovo ThinkPad SL300 with a 1.8-GHz Core 2 Duo and 2GB of RAM, and are in milliseconds. Shorter bars are better:
I don’t want to exaggerate the importance of fast JavaScript–it’s only one factor that determines whether a browser feels snappy or not, and you’d be nuts to make it your primary criterion when choosing a browser. (I still wish Firefox 3.5 launched faster, and the Release Candidate version, at least, can still bog down if you open too many tabs.) But JavaScript performance is a big deal, and TraceMonkey gives Firefox a noticeable speed boost.
System requirementsWindows 2000/XP/Server 2003/Vista, Mac OS X 10.4 and later; Pentium 233MHz (Recommended: Pentium 500MHz or greater), Macintosh computer with an Intel x86 or PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processor; 64MB RAM (128MB RAM for Mac OS X); 52MB hard disk space (200MB for Mac OS X); internet connection
Firefox 3.5 Download MarkAlmost 24 hours ago, the final version of Firefox 3.5 web browser has been released. The good news, it has been downloaded more than 5 million times already and number keeps growing!
Conclusion :
The Firefox 3.5 release builds on the browser's existing strengths to offer a high-quality user experience with a lot of rich new functionality. The addition of HTML 5 video, the faster JavaScript engine, and the new developer-oriented rendering features will boost innovation on the Web and help free users and developers from proprietary-plugin prison. The new privacy, session management, and user interface features will help Firefox stay competitive as its challengers gain greater momentum. In general, this is a great time for the Web. The browser market is becoming increasingly vibrant and enjoying real competition and progress as the growing demand for more powerful Web applications drives the adoption of emerging standards.
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3 comments:
I'm excited to see what kind of changes and improvements Mozilla will do for the next Firefox. I hope they continue to do better. :)
I downloaded and installed it as soon as you posted this. but what i experienced through out these days is, it starts faster than older version of Firefox 3.0.11 but not as fast as IE does. and other thing is it gets crashed far too often... the older version of Firefox ie v 3.0.11 was not crashing .
the crashing problem still there even after i have updated Firefox 3.5 to Firefox 3.5.1
if you can help me.. it will be great
Well Akshay, I didn't encounter such problem... You can submit the crash report to FireFox would help it to grow better :)
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