By Stephen Shankland, 28 April 2009 08:52
NEWS
Mozilla on Monday released beta 3.5 of Firefox, a revamp of the open-source web browser designed to include better performance, several new web-programming features and a private-browsing mode.
The earlier betas had been numbered 3.1, but Mozilla switched to the version 3.5 name after concluding the changes were more significant than it thought before. Mozilla has said earlier the fourth beta will be the last, with more polished release candidates expected before the final version of Firefox 3.5 is released.
The software emerges amid what has become a fiercely competitive browser market. Microsoft has released a significant new version, Internet Explorer 8, while Google has entered the market with Chrome, and Apple is trying to secure a Windows foothold for its Safari browser. Firefox holds second place in market share to IE.
Among the changes compared with the current Firefox 3.0.x versions are:
- The faster TraceMonkey engine for running websites' JavaScript programs
- Built-in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) technology for exchanging data between servers and browsers
- Support for tags to describe audio and video content the way images have been available for years
- Private-browsing mode for leaving no traces on your computer while surfing
- Support for technology to let permitted applications know the user's location
- Support for the web workers standard for letting a browser perform processing in the background without holding back a web application's user interface
With this beta, there are a number of known problems with Gmail and with AVG SafeSearch v8.0 on Windows, and, of course, many of those extensions that are so popular on Firefox could break.
Comments
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1. anonymous
I really don't know why Firefox is so popular. It must just be some anti-Microsoft thing, there are many sites it doesn't work properly with (more than IE) and its slow to load.
I have it on just to confirm the many problems our users come to me with. Yet they think its 'cooler' than IE?
2. Jeremy Wickins
To the previous poster - the only problem I have come across is with the "Verified by Visa" stupidity my wife signed up to. We both use Firefox every day, for a huge range of different sites, and never come across a single problem. It would be good to know what exactly you have in mind with these problems your customers have. Any problems websites have are caused by non-compliant coding, not the browser.
Yes, there are better browsers in terms of size and resource use, but, as I saw on another message board somewhere, the main reason I use Firefox is, quite simply, the No-Script add-on!
3. anonymous
FF's free add-ons are what makes it so popular.
4. Simon
In response to the first comment I have to say that I find Firefox alot quicker than IE8. Like you I have come across some pages which won't display properly but not that many. Although I agree that MS is unnecessarily slagged off by people, I feel that it is justified on this occasion.