Mozilla Firefox 3.5 final is released today with several improvements and new features. The most notable are new Tracemonkey Javascript engine which will make rendering heavy Javascript pages like Google Docs and others to load faster. Geo location features, and HTML 5 tags support is also included. The release also includes improvements to the Gecko layout engine.
With the HTML 5 tags web pages can be designed to include video and audio natively with out needing plugins like Adobe Flash player, although the supported video and audio formats is limited to Ogg Theora for Video and Ogg Vorbis for audio currently.
“Firefox 3.5 supports new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.â€
This release also includes “tab tearing†which allows you drag and drop tabs between browser windows. You can drag out a tab to open it as a new browser window, or drop it back to previous browser window.
Private Browsing:
Firefox 3.5 comes with a private browsing mode aka porn mode, other browsers like Chrome and IE8 already have this feature. The private browsing mode allows you to browse the web with out leaving a trace on the system.
In a Private Browsing session, Firefox won’t keep any browser history, search history, download history, web form history, cookies, or temporary internet files. However, files you download and bookmarks you make will be kept.
To start the private browsing mode go to Tools and select “Start Private Browsingâ€, the tabs which are already open will be closed immediately but Firefox will save them and they will return when you end the Private Browsing session or close the Firefox and reopen it. You can also use a shortcut Ctrl+Shift+P to start and stop private browsing session.
Clear History: Clear recent history got a useful feature, now you can erase history of a timeframe instead of removing the entire history. The option allows you to just remove Last Hour history or last two hours, last four hours or Today and of course everything.
Firefox 3.5 is available in more than 70 languages, Download Firefox 3.5 US English version, download other versions from here.
Updated with more details
Paula Abrahamson says
BTW an example website built around Firefox 3.5’s Geo location feature is aliengoggles.com which was just released in Alpha today.