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 now available for download 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.

Firefox 3.5 brings with it entirely new and much faster rendering engines for both static web pages and the JavaScript code that powers today’s complex web-based applications. There are new privacy features, new capabilities for playing video and audio files and improved search tools. There are also a handful of other new features that should prove useful for both Firefox devotees and newcomers alike.

We’ve been using the latest betas and release candidates for the last few months. No matter what kind of web surfer you are, we recommend you download Firefox 3.5 as soon as you can. Here’s why.

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.

Browser market share as of May, 2009. Source: Net Applications

Speed

Firefox 3.5 has plenty of new features that make it worth the upgrade, but the real reason we love it so much is the massive speed gain. Mozilla claims that Firefox 3.5 is twice as fast as its predecessor. While we haven’t been able to back up these claims reliably in our tests, and Chrome and Safari are still marginally faster than Firefox, you’ll definitely notice a big speed boost on JavaScript-heavy sites like Gmail.

The faster performance is the result of the brand new TraceMonkey JavaScript Engine. According to Mozilla VP of Engineering Mike Shaver, the new tools in TraceMonkey allow JavaScript code to render on par with native code. That means the improved speed won’t just be in web apps. TraceMonkey will also improve add-on performance as well, since extensions and other Firefox tools are written in JavaScript.

Firefox 3.5 isn’t all about JavaScript, though. There have been plenty of changes in the latest version Gecko, the rendering engine that drives Firefox. These enhancements speed up page load times and enable Firefox 3.5 to take advantage of the latest code being used to build the next generation of web applications.

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.

Firefox 3.5 on the Mac desktop, playing a video encoded in Ogg Theora format. You can watch the video without needing to download any plug-ins if you have the latest version of Firefox.

Mozilla director of Firefox Mike Beltzner told Webmonkey that he hopes to eventually see this technology, which is powered by open-source technology called Ogg, replace proprietary solutions like Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight.

“Six years from now, I think you’ll see Ogg video will have taken over the way that PNG has taken over from GIF,” he says.

The new browser also supports offline data storage and the <canvas> element for drawing vector graphics and animations. There are also some new CSS options that let designers create text with shadows and draw border images.

While you may not run across apps using these HTML 5 enhancements in the wild all that often right now, don’t expect that to last. Google is already developing sophisticated web apps that rely heavily on HTML 5 tools like offline data storage and native video embeds. Opera and Apple are also pushing HTML 5 into the web with Safari 4 and Opera 10, respectively.

Perhaps the most significant part of Firefox 3.5′s HTML 5 support (though one most people won’t notice) is the addition of “web workers,” a feature that will allow Firefox to run resource-intensive tasks in the background. While web workers features may not leap out and announce themselves the first time you launch Firefox 3.5, they do promise to make the browser snappier and more stable.

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.

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.

Welcome 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.

Conclusion

Firefox 3.5 feels much more in tune with the way we expect our applications to behave on today’s web — it’s faster, smarter and more useful. And of course the story doesn’t end here. Mozilla is already prepping for the next release (the version number remains up in the air) which will, assuming all goes according to plan, offer isolated tabs for application crashes, integration of the Ubiquity add-on into the Awesome bar and of course, even more enhancements for HTML 5.

See Also:

• How Firefox Is Pushing Open Video Onto the Web
• Next Firefox Speeding Up the Web With Supercharged JavaScript
• Google and Mozilla Team Up to Tell Firefox Where You Are
• Google Throws Its Weight Behind HTML 5
• Firefox to Embrace Porn With New ‘Private Browsing’ Mode

If you’re a Firefox user, you now have the ability to synchronize not only your bookmarks, browsing history and user preferences across multiple PCs — you can also sync your identity.

Mozilla has updated Weave, its free add-on for Firefox that lets you synchronize all your personal data across the various Firefox installations you have running on your work PC, your home PCs and your mobile phone. This latest update to Weave (now at version 0.4, which can be downloaded from Mozilla), builds in support for syncing online identities, including logins and passwords for your favorite websites, as well as support for OpenID logins at any website that utilizes them.

Once you’ve told Weave to keep track of your login data, the plug-in uses the stored identities to automatically log you into your favorite sites, in most cases requiring only a single click. Mozilla showed off Weaves’s new identity syncing features back in May when the company first announced that Weave would support OpenID.

The latest version of Weave also supports Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, which means you can easily transfer your desktop browsing sessions to your Fennec-compatible phone.

We’ve been using Weave since its debut and have found it a handy, if slightly flawed way to keep multiple instances of Firefox in sync. For example, when moving from PC to PC, Weave ensures you get the same results when you start typing into the Smart Location bar. Your most recent set of open browser tabs can be reproduced on multiple machines, as well. But despite a few updates, Weave’s potential — to totally sync every aspect of Firefox across computers — has remained largely untapped.

Fortunately the new Weave 0.4, which arrives just in time for Firefox 3.5′s debut, fills in most of the gaps in previous version and means that you can now maintain two essentially identical Firefox installations running on different computers. If you haven’t made the jump to OpenID yet, you can still take advantage of Weave, as this update includes a new auto-login feature that securely stores and syncs saved login forms across computers.

The new tools means that, not only are your various login credentials synced across computers, but signing in to virtually any site becomes a simple one-click process.

Of course, as with the rest of the things Weave syncs, you can turn off the auto-login syncing if you’d like.

Also new in the latest version of Weave is a support for syncing preference settings, but we should note that the preferences you’re able to sync are somewhat limited. For example, there’s still no support of syncing other Firefox add-ons or their settings.

However, the latest version of Weave sees a serious code rewrite behind the scenes, which Mozilla says should help pave the way for more features like the much requested add-on syncing. The rewritten code also means Weave is considerably faster, and there’s a new set of APIs so that other Firefox add-ons can tap into the power of Weave.

If you’d like to try out the latest version of Weave head over to the Mozilla Labs page and install the add-on. Note that Weave 0.4 requires the latest Firefox 3.5 beta.

See Also:

• Mozilla’s Weave Ties Your Desktop and Your Personal Web Together
• Weave Firefox Synchronization Reaches 0.2 Milestone
• Host Your Own Bookmarks Backup Using Mozilla’s Weave
• Experimental Firefox Add-on Weaves OpenID Into the Browser

Mozilla will release the next major version of Firefox on Tuesday, June 30, Webmonkey has learned. Mozilla confirmed the news Friday afternoon.

The company previously made a promise that it would make the browser available for download “by the end of June” this year. Since next Tuesday falls on the last day of the month, Mozilla is sticking to its word — just barely.

Firefox 3.5 is the first major revision of the popular open-source browser since version 3 landed a little over a year ago, in June of 2008. It features a faster rendering engine, stability enhancements and a new JavaScript engine that boosts the performance of most web-based applications. Firefox 3.5 will also include support for the most widely-used elements of HTML 5, the set of next-generation web standards that allows for offline data access, enhanced web graphics and multimedia playback without plug-ins.

Firefox 3.5 is currently in the post-beta release candidate stage. You can grab a preview release from Mozilla’s website if you can’t wait to download the final code on Tuesday.

Firefox is the browser of choice of between 20 and 25 percent of web surfers. It is second only to Microsoft Internet Explorer, which commands about 65 or 70 percent of the browser market. Browser share data is much disputed, based on who is doing the compiling.

If you’d like more information about Firefox 3.5 and what’s new, check out our links to previous coverage listed below, or head over to Mozilla’s Chris Blizzard’s blog. Blizzard is almost through with his 35 days project in which he highlights Firefox 3.5′s new features and even has some examples of how developers are taking advantage of the new tools to push the limits of the web.

See Also:

• How Firefox Is Pushing Open Video Onto the Web
• Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate Now Available
• Firefox 3.5 ‘Preview’ Paves the Way for Final Release

Movable Type, the publishing platform that has helped many a blogger move from a cookie-cutter hosted blog to a professional looking website, has a new addition to its family.

A group of Movable Type coders have launched Melody, a new version of Movable Type based on the publishing system’s open-source code base.

Of course there is already an open-source version of Movable Type available for anyone to hack on or modify as they see fit. Movable Type’s parent company, Six Apart, released a version of the blogging software under an open-source license in December 2007, while also continuing development of Movable Type as a commercial product. But so far, the open-source release hasn’t seen the sort of community following that similar projects — like Movable Type competitor, WordPress — have enjoyed.

That slow growth is what inspired the birth of the Melody project. Founded by some big names in the Movable Type community — like Byrne Reese, Jay Allen, Tim Appnel, some of whom have worked for Six Apart — the group hopes to revamp the open-source portion of Movable Type to build a more innovation-focused, community-driven product.

The natural question is of course, what does Melody offer that Movable Type doesn’t? For now, not much. Instead, Melody is focusing its initial efforts on re-writing the Movable Type core to make the platform more accessible to developers. The goals is to “decouple” some of the MT core — that is, cut out some of the more advanced features that many users don’t need and start with a more streamlined, lightweight base on which to build.

Unlike some open-source forks, Melody isn’t out to destroy Movable Type. The group plans to keep Melody compatible with the basic MT components — template language, plug-in architecture, et cetera — so that existing MT users can work with both projects without needing to rewrite any of their code. Melody also hopes that its more successful ideas will work themselves upstream, back into Movable Type’s future releases.

For the past few years, WordPress has enjoyed an astounding level of participation from the developer community. There are currently over 5,600 plug-ins available for WordPress, while Movable Type has around 850. The fact that Movable Type continues to be developed as a commercial product may have led to this discrepancy — paying customers demand stability, which often trumps experimentation. While that’s a win for companies relying on Movable Type to host successful websites, it has left some amateur fans out in the cold. Melody is hoping to bring those developers back into the community.

While Melody may not offer anything groundbreaking at the moment, its long term goals are ambitious. Perhaps the most interesting for developers is the plan to make it easier to incorporate existing code into Melody. For example, the Melody developers want to take advantage of the many CPAN Perl modules, and JavaScript libraries like jQuery.

In the case of CPAN, opening up Movable Type’s base to work with outside Perl modules means there’s no need to reinvent to wheel — you can simply import and use the existing tools. With jQuery, it isn’t hard to imagine Melody offering extras like automatic slide shows or other tools built on top of jQuery libraries.

If you’re a fan of Movable Type and would like to contribute to the Melody effort, head over to the new Melody website and see what’s on the development roadmap. You can also grab a copy of the source code, but be aware that Melody is, for the moment, intended primarily for developers looking to extend Movable Type.

See Also:

• Six Apart Reinvigorates Movable Type with New Open-Source Release
• Details On The Open Source Version Of Movable Type
• New Movable Type Pro Wants to Turn Your Blog into a Social Network
• Six Apart Launches Movable Type 4

Firefox’s unique tool for interacting with web services has gotten easier to use thanks to a new update.

Ubiquity 0.5, a project from Mozilla Labs, is a major improvement to one of the browser’s most useful add-ons. It now uses a more natural language engine that’s closer to human speech, and there’s a helpful tutorial for new users. The update also includes support for more languages and more context-sensitive commands.

It’s officially a preview release for Firefox 3 and 3.5. It has a few bugs, but those eager to test it out can grab it now.

The Ubiquity add-on for Firefox is a “command line interface for the web”. It enables you to interact with web services like Google search, Twitter, Yelp, Delicious and Gmail, as well as perform searches on content sites like Amazon, Wikipedia and Flickr. Ubiquity enables you to perform specific tasks, like e-mail a link to a Gmail contact, post a tweet or check the weather, all with just a few keystrokes.

When Ubiquity was first released last year, we hailed it as a huge step forward for the web’s power users. It’s even slicker now, but it still has a problem.

It’s a command line — In order to get the most out of Ubiquity, you have to be the type of person who’s comfortable typing text-based commands into a text-based interface. Obviously, it’s not for everyone.

But the Ubiquity team is closing the gap. Taking a cue from such natural-language tools like Wolfram Alpha and Google’s iPhone app that lets you search the web using your voice, Ubiquity now boasts a new engine that’s able to guess what you want to do even if you don’t give it a specific command or verb.

Previously, you’d have to initiate a task by typing a command like “map” or “translate.” With the new update, you can simply plug an address or a French phrase into Ubiquity, and it’s now smart enough to discern what you want with a surprising level of accuracy.

Better yet, you can just highlight an address on a page and summon Ubiquity. The window will automatically guess you want a map and fetch it for you.

Same with that French phrase. Highlight it and Ubiquity will assume, since you’re using a localized English version of Firefox, you’re looking for an English translation.

Hit Enter and the actual French phrase on the web page is replaced by the English version.

Of course, if it fails to guess properly, you can correct Ubiquity by adding specific parameters to your query, and it will do better next time. It also learns your habits. If you’re a frequent Twitterer, Ubiquity will eventually assume that any raw text you type into it is intended for Twitter, and it will place that choice at the top of the list of suggested services.

As cool as these natural language improvements are, Ubiquity is still a rather esoteric add-on. Thankfully, the download comes with a very friendly tutorial that walks new users through a few common tasks. It really shortens the learning curve by showing you how to use the new command structure.

The tutorial also shows off the power of context-sensitive searches.

I typed “Pink Floyd images” into Ubiquity. My first options were Google image search and a Flickr image search, each with its own set of thumbnails on display within Ubiquity’s little window.

Next, I summoned Ubiquity with a keystroke and typed “cappuccino”. My suggested choices: Twitter the word “cappuccino,” search Yelp for “cappuccino” nearby, search Google for “cappuccino” and translate “cappuccino” into English.

Twitter popped up because that’s one of the things I use Ubiquity for most frequently — it’s learned that. Yelp popped up because Ubiquity gathered that this is a food item I might be looking for, so it’s assuming I want to find said item nearby. Google and Google Translate are probably the most logical third and fourth guesses in this circumstance (It means “cappuccino,” by the way).

View this functionality with an eye to the near future when the geolocation services are fully integrated into the browser, and you can sense how much more powerful this will get. You won’t need to enter any location information. Just type “pizza” or “bookstore” or “weather” and you’ll get what you want — a map, a list or the current temperature — without having to add “94107″ or “San Francisco” to your query.

This Ubiquity update isn’t perfect. It’s a preview release and still rather buggy. There’s a helpful “Reset to factory defaults” button on the help page, which I used a couple of times after Ubiquity kept getting stuck thinking I’d want to post everything to Delicious. Eventually, I removed Delicious from the Ubiquity’s list of available services. It also hung a few times, beach balling Firefox and forcing a browser restart.

But the improvements here point towards a whole new standard for easily interacting with web services in the browser, and we’d recommend it as an essential addition to your power user toolbox.

Will it catch on? Are web users ready for seemingly anachronistic text-based interfaces, no matter how useful? We hope so, because Ubiquity proves how powerful they can be.

See Also:

• Make the Web Do Your Bidding With Firefox’s New Ubiquity UI
• Ubiquity Add-on for Firefox Gets an Update, New Interface
• Geode Tells Firefox Where You Are, What’s Nearby

Songbird on Mac OS X. Click the image for a larger view.

The latest release of the Songbird open-source music player, version 1.2, is now available for Windows, Mac and Linux. The update to one of our favorite music management apps brings several nice new features, including two-way syncing with iTunes and yet another speed bump that puts Songbird on par with Apple’s music player in terms of performance.

We’ve called Songbird the “Firefox of music players” in the past — not only is the jukebox app built on the open-source Mozilla platform, but like Firefox, Songbird continues to improve with every release. Songbird is one part iTunes and one part web browser, making it incredibly easy to browse, find and add free music from your favorite sites to your local library. In short, it’s almost everything we always wanted iTunes to be and quite a bit more.

About that “almost.” There is one big, glaring drawback — Songbird still can’t sync music to an iPhone or the iPod Touch. Building in support for the iPhone and iPod Touch natively in Songbird is high on the developers’ to-do list, but while you’re waiting for that to happen, a new feature in Songbird 1.2 should help ease the pain of those devoted to their Apple handhelds.

The latest Songbird lets you automatically export the tracks and playlists you’ve added to Songbird back into iTunes. The two-way syncing with iTunes means you can manage and listen to your music through Songbird and then simply jump over to iTunes when you need to sync something to your iPhone or iPod Touch. It’s an elegant workaround for the lack of native device support. Of course, Linux users, for whom iTunes isn’t available anyway, are still out of luck.

Among the other new features in this release is the ability to automatically organize your music files and store them in multiple folders. The app looks at your MP3 metadata, which it then uses to organize the files across folders. The whole process is automated, making it remarkably easy to clean up and organize messy libraries or collections spread out over multiple locations.

Songbird 1.2 also adds quite a few new features to the Last.fm plugin. Last.fm fans can now listen to artist, tag, and user stations by sending the station links from Last.fm directly to Songbird. There’s added support for Last.fm’s Radio Directory so you can browse and explore the tag and artist relationships on Last.fm within Songbird. The new Radio Directory support also includes quick links for playing stations based on your Last.fm library, your Songbird library, and the libraries of your friends and neighbors (Last.fm-speak for others on the social network with similar musical tastes).As with every Songbird release since 1.0, this one is quite a bit faster, especially when it comes to complex tasks like importing your iTunes library. It still took a little while to get all of our music and playlists imported, but it was no more than five minutes for a library weighing in at over 200 gigabytes, which isn’t too bad (and something you only need to do once).

If you’d like to take Songbird for a spin, head over to official site and grab the latest version. It’s available for all major platforms, and since it’s open-source, it’s a free download.

See Also:

• Songbird 1.0 Poised to Rule the Jukebox Roost
• Songbird Inches Toward Becoming The Firefox Of The Jukebox
• Songbird Music Player Makes Impressive Performance Gains

As we mentioned last week, Mozilla has rolled out the release candidate of Firefox 3.5. While the initial release went only to beta testers, Firefox 3.5 RC1 was released to the general public on Friday.

With a release candidate in the wild, the final release of Firefox 3.5 inches closer Mozilla’s goal is get Firefox 3.5 out before the end of June.

If Mozilla succeeds, Firefox 3.5 will arrive almost exactly a year after 3.0. That’s a long wait in “internet time,” but Firefox 3.5 brings a host of new features — more than were originally planned — and is significantly faster.

We recently saw a demo of the native HTML 5 video features, which support videos encoded with the Ogg Theora and Vorbis codecs, allowing video to play in the browser without Flash or any other third party plug-ins.

But it’s the speed improvements that really make Firefox 3.5 worth the upgrade. Faster page rendering times and an improved JavaScript engine mean your day-to-day browsing experience is noticeably faster. And the updated user interface, better crash protection and new privacy controls, bring Mozilla’s browser up to speed with more current releases like Apple’s Safari 4 and Google’s Chrome.

If you haven’t already, head over to the download page and take Firefox 3.5 RC1 for a spin.

See Also:

• Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate Now Available
• Firefox 3.5 ‘Preview’ Paves the Way for Final Release
• Firefox 3.5 Nears Completion, Beta 4 Now Available
• Third Firefox 3.1 Beta Ready for Testing
• Firefox 3.1 Will Add More Awesomeness to the ‘Awesome Bar&’