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Labs Gallery: Firefox 3.5 Provides Significant Improvements
By Jim Rapoza
Performance and Reliability Improvements
With performance and reliability improvements in the new Firefox 3.5, users should be able to engage in long browsing sessions with multiple open tabs and windows without fear of crashes or slowdowns.
Private Browsing
Private browsing, a feature found in most other current-generation browsers, is now included in Firefox.
Private Browsing Mode
When in Private Browsing mode, Firefox will not save data or information from the browsing session. The title bar of the browser lets users know that they are in Private Browsing mode.
Forget About This Site
The Forget About This Site feature in Firefox 3.5 makes it possible from the browser History to remove traces of a site already visited.
HTML 5
With Firefox 3.5, Mozilla has enabled significant support for the forthcoming HTML 5 standard. Among other things, HTML 5 makes video viewable by the browser (with no plug-ins needed), and enables high levels of interaction between video and other Web content.
Geolocation Capabilities
Firefox 3.5's geolocation capabilities let users share their location information with Websites for use in applications.
Standards Support
The Acid3 Web standards test shows that Firefox 3.5 improves significantly on the previous version of the Mozilla browser, but is still behind Opera and browsers based on Webkit.
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On the surface it may look like not much has changed in the new version of the Mozilla Web browser, but Firefox 3.5 is actually a very significant improvement, fixing many of the key flaws of previous versions of Firefox and adding some nice new capabilities under the hood. Among the welcome new features are greatly improved speed and stability, a private browsing feature and location-aware capabilities. Also, Firefox 3.5 includes a very good implementation of the forthcoming HTML 5 standard, which allows for cutting-edge interaction in Web pages and makes video as much a part of the browser and the Web as images and text are.