5285 After running the Firefox 3.5 rc2 and rc3 public preview for the past couple or three weeks and having had zero problems with them, I haven't noticed any difference with the Firefox 3.5 final, which is likewise a really solid piece of work.

Firefox 3.5 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for more than a year, and this new browser offers many changes over the previous Firefox 3.0 version, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering and 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.

Firefox 3.5's tabs implementation has been enhanced with new features like the ability to drag-and-drop tabs on and off the tab bar, to rearrange tabs by dragging. One of the Firefox features high on my hit parade is its excellent Session Restore support which can now recover the text in a web forms you may happen to have been typing in when your machine or Firefox crashed (happily not a frequent occurrence) or "unexpectedly quit (likewise)."

Mozilla.org claims that Firefox 3.5 is more than twice as fast running the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. Being a dialup ghetto-dweller, I can't really say except that Firefox 3.5's speed seems to be in the same league as Safari 4 and Opera 10 over my painfully slow Internet connection.

Another advantage with version 3.5 seems to be that Firefox's old Achilles Heel of memory hogging and leaks seems to have been dealt with finally with improved memory management, and so far I'm finding it a good citizen in my software suite.

A Firefox 3.5 feature that will appeal to folks using Internet cafés or shared institutional/work machines is the new private browsing mode (Tools -> Start Private Browsing), working in which Firefox doesn't retain a record of visited pages or any other data on your session other than retaining any Bookmarks you might add while browsing. You can also clear history of a specific recent session or sessions without wiping the entire history data.

Firefox 3.5's new Location Aware Browsing feature enables Firefox to access a Google API to determine where you are, and provide your location to location-aware web sites (not many so far, but they're coming), such as Flickr’s map, and determine your location if you so choose.

Other new stuff in Firefox 3.5 includes support for the HTML5 video and audio elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio, if that appeals, and well as support for native JSON, and web worker threads.

My biggest complaint with Firefox remains its somewhat bland and unimaginative user interface (a shortcoming it shares with Apple's Safari), but that's something you can alter with a variety of available Firefox skin personas or themes plug-ins.

Here's the Walnut2 for Firefox 1.8.50 theme by Alfred Kayser that I've been using, which I find more interesting and attractive than the default appearance theme. There is a vast selection of alternate Firefox themes available.

Themes
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:2/cat:all?sort=popular

Personas
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10900

Something else I miss in Firefox is the convenient Zoom menus that Opera and Safari have on their interface windows.

Firefox has never been a particularly exciting browser compared with, say, Opera, iCab, or some of the other "alternative" browsers available, whose feature sets I find more imaginative, innovative, and interesting, and version 3.5 is no exception to that, but it is a very solid and reliable Web workhorse tool that has been refined and enhanced with this new release, and a lot of the time solid and reliable is exactly what you want.

Firefox 3.5 is cross-platform, supporting Mac OS X, Windows Vista and XP, and Linux, and is available in more than 70 languages.

System requirements (Mac):
• Mac OS X 10.4 and later

Minimum Hardware
• Macintosh computer with an Intel x86 or PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processor
• 128 MB RAM (Recommended: 256 MB RAM or greater)
• 200 MB hard drive space

For more information, visit:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.5/releasenotes/
and
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/


Charles W. Moore

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