By Benny Har-Even
While we agree that Internet Explorer has come on a long way, we still don’t think it’s the best option out there.
There are now several web browsers out there, all competing for your attention and the biggest of these alternatives, Firefox, has just received a major update.
What is Firefox?
If you recall your web history, in the late nineties, the ‘browser wars’ were conducted between Microsoft and Netscape. We all know who won that one, but out of the ashes of Netscape came an open source browser project – originally Phoenix (out-of-the-ashes, geddit), then changed to Firebird, and then eventually to Firefox.
Since version 2, released in October 2006, it’s started to significantly eat away at Microsoft’s market share and version 3 achieved a over eight million downloads in a single day - getting itself into the Guinness World Records in the process.
Firefox is widely liked for its expandability, with its design allowing for the creation for third-party plug-ins or ‘add-ons’. These provide extra features and make for a highly customisable web browsing experience.
What happened to Firefox 3.1?
Soon after version 3.0 was released, Mozilla began to take up the version 3.1 update and this was supposed to have been released some months ago. However, as new features and enhancements were added it was renamed to version 3.5, to better reflect the number of improvements.
OK, so what’s new in 3.5?
There are a number of new features in 3.5, but the one that many will care about it promised speed improvements – competition has hotted up in recent months with both Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari 4 claiming speed records, and Firefox 3 is starting to feel its age.
It’s all to do with the use of the Javascript rendering engine. Javascript is used for much of the new fangled Web 2.0 world we live in today, so getting it speedy is important - and Mozilla claims that it’s twice as fast as Firefox 3 was and can compete with Chrome and Safari.
The new version also supports HTML5, the latest web standard and this contains support for a new video tag – which means that you’ll be able to watch video in your browser without any need for a plug-in. The videos are in the open source Ogg Theora format though, and Daily Motion is the only major video site to support it as yet.
Other new bits include an ‘In-Private’ mode – just hit ‘Ctrl-shift-P’ to stop Firefox from remembering your browsing session – perfect for searching for that new job or - ‘ahem’ – other activities. You can also tell 3.5 to forget a site you’ve been to after the fact, just by finding and deleting in the history.
Tear it Up
We also like being able to tear off your tab and drag it out to make a new windows (nicked from Chrome) and ‘Location Aware Browsing’, so if you’re searching for information you don’t need to tell it anything – it knows where you are. Yes, you can turn it off, you paranoid people.
Downloadable fonts can help make web site start to look ‘the way the director intended’. This means you don’t need to have a font already on your system for the web page to use it, negating the need for designers to user static images, which makes for a more editable and searchable internet.
Finally, the ‘session restore’ has been improved, so in the event of a unexpected shut-down or crash, everything is remembered, which could be great if you’re composing an email in the browser.
Sounds awesome! When can I get it?
Now. Firefox 3.5 is available for download.
Look out for our full review of the full version on the site later this week.
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Source Content : www.itpro.co.uk
