Review: Firefox 3.5

Firefox 3.5, the long-awaited mega-upgrade to the already awesome Firefox browser by Mozilla, just came out today at around 8:00am. Within about 3 hours, Firefox 3.5 had already been downloaded a million times in the United States alone.

I have been eagerly awaiting the release of this new version of Firefox, and when it came out this morning, I didn’t hesitate in downloading the update. Now that I’ve been using it for a while, here are some of the things you can expect:

Logo Redesign

At first, I didn’t even see any changes to the Firefox 3.5 logo. But if you look closely, you will see that there have been a few color modifications, especially in the tail of the fox. It looks much more rich than the old logo.

New Interface

For the eagle-eyed users, you will notice that the borders of the navigation bar buttons have gotten much skinnier, which saves just the tiniest bit of space, but it’s worth it. Mac users will also notice a slightly different loadin bar in the status bar.

The tabs don’t look too different, besides a “New Tab” button that can’t be removed. I think it’s also defaulted to show the tab bar even when you only have one tab on.

Your add-ons’ interfaces may look different too, just because of Firefox’s new interface. The add-ons themselves haven’t changed.

History and Private Browsing

Finally, Firefox introduces Private Browsing. Safari was the first browser to introduce it. Private browsing allows you to surf the web without anyone knowing. This is especially helpful if you’re using a public computer. In History, there’s also a “Forget this site” function when you right-click a website. The function deletes all the items in the history that link to that particular site. It’s like a super-charged delete function. And, if you want to clear all your history or just part of it, you can clear history within 2 hours, 6 hours, and so on.

Video and Audio

Firefox now has video and audio support, meaning that instead of having to download video/audio to play it, you can play it right in your browser. Firefox now supports .ogg formats of video/audio.

JavaScript

The JavaScript performance has definitely been accelerated, although it’s not quite the 2X faster that Mozilla claims. It’s closer to 1.25-1.5X.

Bugs

Your add-ons may clash with each other. For example, TwitterFox and ScribeFire will leave some “residue” on each other if you open them simultaneously.

For existing Firefox users, I recommend that you upgrade immediately and for people who don’t use Firefox yet, I highly recommend it, with a rating of 9/10.