New in Firefox 3.5

Mozilla Firefox version 3.5 will be a major new release (it’s due out at the end of June) with a stack of new features. I’ve just started beta testing the latest release candidate (3.5b4) and already noticing improved performance compared with version 3.1, although it’s still not as fast as Google Chrome according to independent reports. The trade-off there is that Chrome doesn’t yet support the various tools and addons I use, such as NoScript and various Greasemonkey scripts.

Firefox 3.5 does seem to perform better than previous versions and didn’t take long to start up from a cold start. When I saved the draft of this page it seemed to refresh within a split second, whereas on 3.1, I’d normally wait several seconds before I could carry on writing or editing in Wordpress. That’s a much appreciated boost for me.

Mozilla says improvements are partly due to its new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. They are also due to improvements in the Gecko layout engine, which include speculative parsing for faster content rendering. Firefox has also improved security and privacy features, including the now obligatory “Private Browsing Mode,” (equivalent to Chrome’s Incognito tab).

“Geo” is the current buzz word of the day and Firefox now has the ability to provide location aware browsing using web standards for geolocation. Additionally, it supports new web technologies such as HTML5 video and audio elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms, for those interested in the technical aspects.

If your web browser is mission critical, don’t download it just yet, this is a beta, well officially it’s a release candidate, which is like the final, final beta. Either way, before you install, make sure you’ve backed up your favorites, bookmarks, settings etc.