Mozilla Pushes the Web Forward With Firefox 3.5
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.
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