The Mozilla Team has done a great job with the new Firefox 3.5 browser. FF 3.5 is twice as fast as FF 3 in terms of Javascript speed and even 10 times faster than FF 2.
Smaller Memory Footprint
One of the things I didn’t like about Firefox was the fact that having several tabs open would lead to an unbelievably high consumption of memory. These days are over. The XPCOM cycle collector continuously cleans up unused memory. Plus, hundreds of memory leaks have been remedied.
Awesome Bar
The location bar is now called the awesome bar for good reasons. Now you have Safari functionality inside Firefox. You don’t need to remember exactly the website URL anymore – just start typing some keyword and it will present you results from your browsing history. Great!
Offline Browsing
Websites that are Google Gear enabled (like GMail) you can surf offline without having to install any additional Add-ons.
Newest Web Technologies
These web technologies are now natively supported:
- CSS 2.1
- CSS 3
- HTML5
- SVG Filters
- Ogg Vorbis
- Ogg Theora
- Native JSON
- MathML
- Animated Portable Network Graphics (APNG)
- Cross-Site XMLHttpRequest
- Microformats
- Web Worker Threads
Private Browsing
You can easily switch between normal and private browsing and you won’t leave a single browsing fingerprint behind for others to discover. You can even remove every trace of a specific site from your browser without loosing the history of the rest of the sites.
