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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.

8 of 436 comments (clear)

  1. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by pdboddy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yeah, I thought the same, a convenient way to browse. And being able to close FF and open it later on with all my tabs intact, that's even better.

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    Julie Moult is an idiot.
  2. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Freedom+Bug · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I leave Firefox 3.0 open for weeks at a time, and I'm liable to have close to a hundred tabs open across 12 windows. Granted, it uses almost a gigabyte of memory, but I don't think any browser would do any better for that kind of load. The only time I ever need to restart is because Flash has stopped working.

  3. Released!?!! by ericlondaits · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As of now, if you got to Mozilla's page and choose to download Firefox, you get version 3.5 :

    http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/upgrade.html

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    As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
  4. Re:A Bug No One Mentions by RebelWebmaster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yes, they've done a lot of work to reduce the number of fsync() calls used. There are numerous bugs filed tracking that work. More work is still planned, but it should already be in better shape than 3.0.x was.

  5. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Sancho · · Score: 3, Interesting

    How do you manage that? I mean, when you want to go to a page, do you really look for it in all of your tabs? What do you gain by leaving the tab open instead of just going back to the site when you want to view it again?

    I tend to max out at about 10 tabs because I close them when I'm not actively using them. It's really, really rare that I even actively use that many.

  6. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by TheCycoONE · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Threading would work just as well, if not better in your scenario. Separate processes just gives you the extra boundary of protection and convenience that comes with not sharing memory.

  7. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Junior+J.+Junior+III · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I know that i really shouldn't have that many tabs open, but as someone else pointed out it's a convenient bad habit.

    Who the fsck is anyone to tell you how you should use your web browser? If you need the browser to support 120 open tabs, then if it doesn't do this well, then it's a tool not well suited to your task. You should expect it to require some system resources to pull this off, but those that the application asks for should be managed properly and freed up if no longer needed. That is not too much to ask for, and you shouldn't apologize if you choose to use the product this way.

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    You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
  8. So still no MSI for Windows by Ilgaz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    May I really ask who or what Firefox developers fight(!) with? Like or not, MSI is the way to get into Enterprise, a signed MSI is even better. In fact, most of .exe installers you see these days are actually MSI packaged in .exe.

    It is really interesting that they insist on not shipping MSI versions of their software, at least in a FTP folder like "alternate_installers" which admins will pull msi from. It became even more interesting since I found this: http://wix.sourceforge.net/ , yes open source from MS, hosted by Sourceforge and it actually works. What does MSI do? Hurt feelings of the developers there? I really can't understand. It is basically RPM for Windows which gives some bonus features like repair etc. to ordinary users but it is huge deal on enterprise.

    ps: Same thing on OS X but we are kinda fine with Drag&Drop installs while it even matters at home sized networks. A .pkg would be way better. Anyway, no gigantic enterprise sized OS X networks around like the Windows ones.