Firefox 3.5 Reviewed; Draws Praise For HTML5, Speed

johndmartiniii writes "Farhad Manjoo has a review of Firefox 3.5 at Slate.com this week. From the article: 'Lately I've been worried about Firefox. Ever since its debut in 2004, the open-source Web browser has won acclaim for its speed, stability, and customizability. It eventually captured nearly a quarter of the market, an astonishing achievement for a project run by a nonprofit foundation. But recently Firefox seemed to go soft.' The worried tone in the beginning of the review gives way to excitement over the HTML5 features being implemented, saying that thus far Firefox 3.5 'offers the best implementation of the standard — and because it's the second-most-popular Web browser in the world, the new release is sure to prompt Web designers to create pages tailored to the Web's new language.'" The final version could be here at any time; Firefox 3.5 is still shown as a release candidate at Mozilla's home page. Update: 06/30 15:31 GMT by T : No longer marked as RC; the Firefox upgrade page now says 3.5 has arrived.

Comments

As usual with new Firefox releases...

[Daetrin]

The main thing i want to know is if they've (finally) fixed the memory issues yet. Namely, if i keep a lot of tabs open for awhile (yes, i know, bad habit) and then close those tabs, will Firefox free up the memory (frequently over a gig of it) without requiring me to shut it down and restart it?

Re:As usual with new Firefox releases...

[oldspewey]

if i keep a lot of tabs open for awhile (yes, i know, bad habit)

This is a bad habit? I've always just thought of it as a convenient way to browse.

Re:As usual with new Firefox releases...

[Anonymous Coward]

1.5GB looks like much, but it's only 12.5MB per tab. Considering that the browser has to keep the state and source data of every page, it doesn't seem excessive. Are you sure that the pages aren't running scripts which accumulate stale data over the course of days and weeks, because the programmers never expected their scripts to run for that long and didn't include any cleanup code, because that's usually handled by the browser when you leave the page or close the tab (which you never do)?

What about Slashdot?

[macbeth66]

the new release is sure to prompt Web designers to create pages tailored to the Web's new language

Although, I would be happy if Slashdot would work right with the existing standards.

Re:Softpedia claims to have it already

[pdboddy]

Do not download FF from anywhere except the main FF site. :P And FF3.5 is up now for download. Pretty snappy, speed-wise. :)

Competition

[koreaman]

Am I the only one who doesn't see the multiplicity of real competition as a threat, but rather as the greatest success of the Mozilla Foundation? Had it not been for Firefox, Opera would still cost money, Google Chrome wouldn't exist, a few people who paid way too much for their computers would be running Safari, and most (l)users would be stuck with the latest version of IE -- IE6. Thank you, Firefox, for reigniting the browser wars, and here's hoping that this time around the wars will be fought with functionality, stability, security, and speed, rather than with a new incompatible extension to JavaScript every week.

Isn't this a little overkill?

[Xaedalus]

Please excuse me for being a paltry light user of Firefox... but aren't you an outlier in this particular case? The most tabs I ever have open on Firefox is three, maybe four. IMHO, you're a power user and while your comments are insightful, I have to wonder whether or not your insights are of relevance to the average user of Firefox? I'm all for improvement, but if the improvement is only noticeable when you've got 30+tabs open a day and are burning through close to a gig of RAM to keep everything operating... then what good is the improvement to the average user?