I had high hopes for the release of Firefox 3.5. Easily the most extensible browser with an innumerable number of add-ons available, it’s the one browser I always want to be using but often don’t simply because it’s not fast enough.
For this latest iteration, the browser’s TraceMonkey JavaScript engine does make some inroads in speed. Compared with the competition, however, it’s still considerably slower than both Chrome and Safari, which I have been running side by side on my Windows XP machine. Against Chrome, Firefox performed as much as two times slower, with an average speed difference of about 80%.
Interface is pretty much the same and should be familiar to longtime users. I’ve really been waiting for Firefox to lose the entire main menu row in place of a dropdown icon (same as with both Chrome and Safari) but, alas, we’re not that fortunate yet.
There are a bunch of new features for this iteration, of course. There’s a new “privacy mode” that’s designed to let you surf incognito, a cool geo-location feature that allows websites to detect your geographical position and full support for all the nifty features of HTML 5.0.
As of this writing, the number of plugins that have been updated to support Firefox 3.5 is steadily growing. A number of notable ones (such as Google Gears), however, are still on the way, so you may want to hold off on upgrading until full support for all the add-ons you use are available.
Overall, Firefox 3.5 is an update to support HTML 5.0, more than anything else. Those who were hoping to see better speed and an improved interface will have to wait longer for their wishes to be fulfilled. It’s still not going to be my primary browser (because of the speed) but it remains an often-used secondary one (until Chrome gets stronger developer support).
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