ForcaTech Blog

Firefox 3.5 Stable is finally here. What has changed from the betas we have seen? Not much.

Coming from 3.0 to 3.5? Then you will notice considerable differences/improvements such as the ability to drag a tab from one window to the other or to the desktop to open a new window. The new private browsing feature is great as well. Now if you are at school, in the library or another public location you can go to Tools and select Start Private Browsing. You can browse normally. Cookies, etc will still be stored but as soon as you exit private browsing everything will be destroyed.

From the the Mozilla Firefox site:

• Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)
• Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

One unmentioned(unimportant?) difference that probably no one would have noticed was the change in icon.

Notice it? The new logo has been smoothed out, the continents are less defined and fox is a little more red…. Ok yes it is a very slight change but I noticed. They tried to pull a fast one over on us. Nice try Firefox. Nice try.

But none of this really matters does it? We just like to upgrade. If every few days they released a new update that was nothing other than an update that changed the version number of the browser we were using we would still be happy wouldn’t we? It is the update that makes us happy not the bug fixes, additional languages and extra themes.

So what are you waiting for? Apply the updates or download Firefox 3.5 now!