Home Computing, Webmasters - by Yen on Tuesday, June 30, 2009 11:59 - 0 Comments
New Nitro-charged Firefox 3.5 Released
Mozilla had just announced that a new major version for their Firefox had been released today – Firefox 3.5! (Source) And what is in it for us, the end-users?
Looking at the official product page, it seems that the major improvement (or ’selling point’, but then it’s free isn’t?) would be the turbo-charged Javascript; 91% speed improvement over Firefox 2 and 58% speed improvement over Firefox 3. So not you know why I called it nitro-charged. Or is it really that fast or is it that it was just previously too slow. After all, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera and IE wasn’t in the race.
Another new feature worth noting would be the private browsing mode which is already available in a few other browsers. And then there’s also the so-called dynamic tab where tabs can be dragged out of the browser to create new windows as in Google Chrome. Visit the Firefox features page for a full list of new or improved features. And stay tuned as I’ll be adding to this article after a ‘full experience’ review…
UPDATE JULY 8 2009
It seems like this version is not really release-ready. There are some major bugs.
First one would be the ‘tab tear’ bug where clicking on a tab sometimes results in tearing the tab to a new Firefox window. Officially know as Bug 489729, there is even an extension made specifically to disable tab tearing.
The second major bug would be “crashing due to problems caused by the new TraceMonkey Javascript engine”. (Source: Mozilla Firebug? – lowyat.net)
After using this version for more than a week, I had unfortunately experienced both bugs with the ‘tab tear’ bug being more frequent and annoying as well. But other than that, it does seems to be a version with better features and performance. So let’s just hope and pray that a new less buggy version be released really really soon.
Continue on to part 2 (version 3.5.1).
Leave a Reply