Firefox 3.5 has been officially released today. You can download it from this page. I think that you should install it right now. Or, if you already use Firefox then upgrade to Firefox 3.5 immediately. If you don’t see the upgrade notice then you can force the upgrade by downloading the version 3.5 and installing it. Why I am insisting on getting Firefox 3.5? Here are some of the reasons-
Why You Should Upgrade To Firefox 3.5?
1. Firefox 3.5 is the fastest version of Firefox ever. With a new JavaScript Engine and various other enhancements, it is around 20 to 40 times faster then the earlier versions of Firefox.
2. Private Browsing – Google chrome was first to introduce the private browsing concept, calling it incognito mode. After that almost every browser came with the concept in one form or the other. Firefox is probably the last to implement private browsing, but better late, then never ;) .So, if you are a Firefox fan like me, then you’ll be happy to see use this new feature.
To start a private browsing session, go to Tools menu and click on Start Private Browsing. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+P to start it. Once you are browsing privately, no information about your browsing session, like history, cookies etc. is stored. To stop the private browsing session, go to Tools menu and click on Stop Private Browsing.
3. Forget About This Site -You can use this feature to erase the footprints (history, cookies etc) for a specific site on your browser. Its a kind of selective private browsing, you surf the internet normally but you can erase the history of any specific site. Very useful feature.
To delete the footprints for a specific site, go to History > Show All History. Then right click on the site that you want to remove and click on Forget About This Site. That’s it, the browser will now delete all the traces of this website from your browsing session.
4. You can also delete the history for last few hours of your browsing. To do so, go to Tools > Clear Recent History, and select the time interval for which you want to delete the history.
5. Tab Tearing – The feature that allowed you to pull out a tab from browser to create a new window. It was also introduced by Google Chrome, but now Firefox has also implemented the feature.
6. Earlier you could open the recently closed tabs by going to History > Recently Closed Tabs. But now there is a new option to open the recently closed windows. If you have accidentally closed a window with a number of tabs in it, then you can re-open it easily. Just go to Tools > Recently Closed Windows, and click on the window that you want to open.
7. You can now save videos just like you save an image. Simply right click on any video that’s been playing in Firefox, and click on Save Video.
There are many more advanced features added like Location aware browsing, Downloadable Fonts, Web Worker Threads etc. Also SVG, JSON, CSS rendering has been improved a lot. Check the following video to find out more about these features,
Good article. Small point: I think Safari had private browsing long before Google chrome. FireFox is still a much better browser but there are usability features I wish developers would steal from apple.
@Gregory
Thanks for the correction. I’ll update the post with the info.
Hi Mayur,
This is very nice post and i like to suggest FF 3.5 or more in the best use for everything.