By Stephen Shankland, 1 July 2009 15:00
NEWS
Firefox 3.5, the embodiment of Mozilla's attempt to "upgrade the web", is now available for Windows and Mac.
Firefox 3.5 has a range of new features, including a new JavaScript engine for faster web applications such as Google Docs; the ability to show video built into web pages without plug-ins; a private browsing mode; fancy downloadable fonts; and geolocation technology that can let websites know where you are.
John Lilly, CEO of Firefox backer Mozilla, said in a statement: "So much is happening on the web right now, it's a great time for browsers."
With the software released, Mozilla programmers and their open source comrades now can move on to the next round of updates, to encouraging web developers to build in support for the new features, and to finalising new standards such as HTML 5.
Firefox broke Microsoft's lock on the browser market, but it now faces other challenges, chiefly Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome.
Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 in 70 different languages, taking advantage of the relatively broad internationalisation that's more feasible with open source software.
Through revenue that comes from search ads, Google supplied Mozilla with $66m of its $75m in 2007 revenue, the last year for which figures are publicly available.
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