Mozilla Corporation has just launched the fastest Firefox web browser, Firefox 3.5. Developers say that this release is stable, robust and fast in browsing. It has many advanced features when compared to its previous releases and supports new web technologies.

We have made an attempt to highlight some of the interesting and innovative features added by the Mozilla Corporation in this new release.

Speed does matter!

This is considered to be the fastest browser when compared with its previous releases. The results were baffling when they compared the loading time of Firefox 2, Firefox 3 and the latest release Firefox 3.5.

• Firefox 2.X – 18,148 ms (load time)
• Firefox 3.0.X – 3,669 ms (load time)
• Firefox 3.5 – 1,524 ms (load time)

Privacy!

It has enhanced security features to protect your private data. Firefox 3.5 release has introduced “Private Browsing Mode” by which the user can browse websites by surpassing the web history being saved on his/her local machine. This feature was earlier introduced in Google Chrome as “Incognito”. This feature would be helpful to users who use a public machine to browse websites. In this mode, Firefox won’t keep track on browser history, search history or download history. The cookies and temporary internet files will be deleted automatically once the session is closed. In case, if the user wishes to save a website, then the only option would be to save it in bookmarks.

To start Private Browsing, Click on Tools> Start Private Browsing (Ctrl+Shift+P); to stop it simply click on Tools> Stop Private Browsing or restart the browser.

Note: Even though there is no record of the browsing history on your local computer, your ISP or your employer can still track visited pages.

Forget the Site!

This feature allows the user to get rid of the website which he doesn’t want to save in his web history. If you are ordering a present online or you don’t want to share the website information with anyone else then you can just click History, select the site, right click on it and click Forget about this site. In case you forget the website or want to delete the recent past history of few hours or days click tools in the menu bar, click on the Clear Recent History (Ctrl+ Shift+ Del) and select your desired time range to clear.

Open Recently Closed Windows

Unlike release 2 and 3.0, Firefox 3.5 has added a new menu item to History tab called “Recently Closed Windows”. Apart from restoring the closed tabs we can also restore the closed windows. Click History tab on the Menu bar and pick any of the windows that you recently closed or restore all the closed windows.

Upgrade for Web!

Apart from upgrading the browser version, it has also upgraded the features for web. Apart from the normal things that you can do with a video like play, pause, adjusting the volume etc. you can also save your favourite videos just like saving an image on your computer. Right click on the video, select Save Video As, select the location on your computer, click OK and you are done.

Where am I?

Firefox 3.5 can tell websites where you’re located so that you can find more relevant and more useful information. It gathers information about the nearby access points and your computer’s IP address. Then it sends the information to default geo location service provider to get estimation on the location. In case if it is unable to find it, it returns “Oops! An error occurred while trying to determine your position.”
Note: These locations are only estimates and Google doesn’t guarantee accuracy in finding the location.

Click for more: http://www.Mozilla.com/en-US/Firefox/geolocation/

Web Technologies!

Other Web technologies supported by Firefox 3.5 are

1) Download fonts feature allows the web designers and developers to integrate various font styles and font families in their design.

2) Enhanced CSS improvements in Firefox 3.5 allow the designers to style the web layouts and help them to view the web pages exactly how they wanted to see in web browsers.

3) Web Worker threads.

4) JSON and

5) SVG.

The latest enhancements to be made in Firefox 3.5 release are

• Improved performance and better stability are achieved using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• In order to render the content with minimum load time an improvisation is done to the Gecko layout engine.
• This version is available in 70 languages and supports the Operating systems like Windows, Mac and Linux.

Flaws that are to be tackled!

Mozilla Corporation is trying to fix some of the bugs that were encountered with Firefox 3.5 (Release Candidate)

• If a pop-up window is focused when you enter Private Browsing Mode, the Location Bar in the first Private Browsing Mode window will not be editable.
• After installing this version, users will not be able to return to a previous beta version of Firefox 3.5 without creating a new profile.
• After using Clear Recent History some SSL sites will not load all images and styles without pressing reload.
• Some sites which require Java to Javascript communication may not work properly.
• Some sites with Flash can cause problems with the Cookies dialog.
• Web pages can no longer automatically install PKCS11 cryptographic tokens. Users are now required to do this manually or install an Add-on that installs them.

There are thousands of add-ons available on Mozilla webpage. The available add-ons are classified into categories; any user can easily go through them and install the desired add-on. These unique characteristics make Mozilla Firefox to be the king among other potential web browsers.

Click here for more addons