Firefox 3.5 Released
Mozilla has just released the final version of Firefox 3.5. As I noted in my review of the release candidate, JavaScript performance — critical for many web apps — is massively improved thanks to the new TraceMonkey engine, making 3.5 feel very fast indeed. I tried running the final release through the Sunspider performance benchmarks, and it doesn’t look like there are any major differences between it and the release candidate.
In addition to improved performance and standards compliance, Firefox 3.5 also features new privacy controls, location-aware browsing, and the ability to play video and audio content without using plugins. A quick video tour of the new version is available here.
Firefox 3.5 is a free download for Windows, Mac and Linux from Mozilla.
Share your thoughts on Firefox 3.5 in the comments.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Too bad they added a feature that gives another meaning to “web workers”… https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Using_DOM_workers
Need to update the post icon to the new Firefox logo ;-)
Be sure to confirm your add-ons (plugins) have already been updated to support the new version before upgrading.
You can also download the Intel-Optimized version at http://www.latko.org/downloads/. I have Firefox 3.6 pre-Alpha 1 there as well.
Well, I held off yesterday as it seemed folks struggled with add-ons being updated but I did take the plunge to 3.5 this morning.
Other than an almost immediate crash it seems to be working smashingly, and so far also to be keeping memory creep in check.
SB