Firefox 3.5 set to push the Web a step forward
Mozilla Firefox 3.5 is the culmination of nearly a year-long quest to build a browser for the next version of the web. And while it’s not perfect, it comes very, very close.
The open-source browser is expected to be available for download Tuesday morning for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Originally envisioned as a quick follow-up to 2008’s release of Firefox 3.0, Mozilla ended up packing in quite a few extra features into its flagship browser and spent months making sure that Firefox 3.5 was the fastest, most powerful Firefox yet
Here is aQuick look on what iti offers:
A New Browser for a New Web
Much has changed in the year since Firefox 3 first hit the scene. Most significantly, Google Chrome arrived in September 2008, bringing with it support for many of the web’s latest technologies. Things like offline data access, geo-awareness and native video and audio playback were previously only glamor features — now that Google is highlighting the importance of those features, they’re must-haves. Chrome also came out of the gate showing off some extreme speed, and it spurred some friendly competition among browser makers to boost their speed of their apps. The latest versions of Safari and Opera showed large speed gains as a result.
Another reason browsers are getting faster is because websites are growing more complex. It’s not only social networks and media sharing sites that are responsible, but also productivity applications like e-mail, calendars and other office apps. These web destinations are behaving like full-blown applications, and they’re require more powerful, more nimble browsers.
Microsoft, which still commands the lion’s share of the browser market (see chart below), released a new version of Internet Explorer earlier this year. IE8 upped the ante when it comes to privacy, safety and usability features that are easy enough for consumers to grasp. It also got a speed boost.
So, Firefox, not even a year old, has a lot of catching up to do. Version 3.5 fills in the gaps admirably.
Taskfox
Taskfox is a recently announced project at Mozilla to bring some of the experimental Ubiquity user interface and navigation paradigms to Firefox. Some of those navigation features are higher priority and will more likely find their way into Firefox.next, but if there’s time, we could actually see a lot more of Ubiquity in the next big version of Firefox.
Better Session Management – I already mentioned that the ability to create, save, and restore a group of tabs is a low priority addition for Firefox.next, but this would be such a hugely useful feature that it deserves a second mention. Firefox can currently save and restore session data when you shut down the entire program or suffer through a browser crash, but there’s not really a good way to just save a set of tabs and put them aside for later, which is something I often want to do when researching multiple posts. The best option right now is just to bookmark tabs or save them elsewhere (like in a text file or on Delicious) — those aren’t very good options.
HTML 5
Though it won’t be finalized for at least another year, the specification for HTML 5 — the next revision of the markup language used to build websites — is already being implemented by the latest browsers. This new version of Firefox brings Mozilla’s browser up to speed with most recent releases by supporting many of the capabilities afforded by HTML 5.
The HTML 5 support in Firefox 3.5 allows for video and audio embeds without the need for the Flash plug-in. Right now, most video and audio playback on the web requires Adobe’s Flash Player. Even though it’s a free download, Mozilla thinks it’s too limiting to require a plug-in to watch videos and listen to songs, so it built those capabilities right into the browser. Now, website publishers can place a video into a web page just as they would a photograph or any other graphic, and it will play smoothly in Firefox 3.5 — no plug-in required.
Privacy
Firefox 3.5 brings a much more robust private browsing mode that restricts the information your browser gathers as you visit websites. While surfing in private browsing mode, cookies are rejected, URLs are kept out of the browser history, forms are not auto-filled and pages are not cached. The result is a browser session that — from the browser’s point of view — never happened.
This is a sign that Firefox is taking a cue from the competition. Chrome, IE8 and Safari all have this feature. Although often referred to as “porn mode,” the privacy settings are actually very useful on public PCs, like those in internet cafes. As long as the PC is running a browser that has a private mode, you don’t need to worry about covering your tracks after the fact.
Identity Management – There’s not much information about what this means, but Mozilla is again talking identity management as they did before Firefox 3.0. Back then it meant things like OpenID and CardSpace — we’ll have to see what it means this time around.
New Tab Page – One of the coolest features of Google Chrome browser is their new tab page, which shows users their most frequently visited web sites when they open up a new tab. Firefox might be planning to follow suit in version 3.6 with something perhaps similar to the proposed new tab page prototype they showed off in March.
Geo-awareness
On the social web, where you are is almost as important as who you are and what you’re doing.
With Firefox 3.5, a web app that wants to know where you are can now just ask Firefox. Once you provide a web app with permission to do so (Firefox’s geolocation abilities are opt-in, as they should be), the application can use the browser to determine your location.
This means developers can provide more accurate local search results and other geo-aware functionality without the user having to install any special software or having to manually enter location data, like a ZIP code.
Google and Mozilla have partnered for Firefox’s geo-aware features — the underlying code will use Google’s Location Service as its default location provider. This is the same web service that powers all of Google’s geolocation applications, including Google Latitude and the location finder in Google Toolbar.
Search on Steroids
Firefox 3.0 introduced the world to the “Awesomebar,” the feature that turned the previously neglected URL bar into a powerful history and bookmark search tool. In fact, the idea was so compelling that Google’s Chrome browser launched with the very same feature.
The new Firefox 3.5 builds on the Awesomebar’s foundations adding sophisticated wildcard search tools for power users. For example, typing an asterisk limits results to your bookmarks and typing a pound sign (#) limits results to page titles (rather than titles and URLs).
Performance in the Awesomebar is also significantly improved, the occasional lag between when you start typing and when the first result shows up has been reduced to almost nil.
Other Small Changes
Among the most noticeable new features are the much-improved crash recovery system. Rather than a simple “restore/don’t restore” dialog, Firefox 3.5 will allow you selectively choose which windows and tabs to restore after a crash. That makes it considerably easier to isolate problem sites without losing your entire session. It isn’t as nice as Chrome’s isolated tabs feature, but Mozilla says that’s in the works for future releases of Firefox.
Another handy new feature is the ability to recover an accidentally closed window. While Firefox has long offered this feature for tabs, Firefox 3.5 builds on that to offer a way of recovering from errant mouse clicks that close an entire window.
Referals:
http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Mozilla_Pushes_the_Web_Forward_With_Firefox_3DOT5
