Firefox 3.5 : Enhanced Web Experience

A Fox on Fire

Do you often wait for few seconds, before your browser displays your request?

How often do you delete your surfing history, so that none gets to know about your activity on net?

Do you download videos and audio through some downloader or other proxy sites?

Well these are some common issues that we face while stumbling with our browser.

Today, Mozilla organization officially released the latest version of Firefox. Mozilla Firefox 3.5 , is an open source application i.e. one is free to modify and further develop it . It has come up with many unique and exciting features so as to make websurfing even more enthralling.

Here are some features that I found interesting that would like to share with you :

1) A1 Speed:

It is the first thing that we all look for prior selecting a web browser for installation. With Firefox2.0 installed, I found a difference in page loading speed improvement in the Firefox3.5 version.Eariler i used to wait for several seconds and now I wait for some milliseconds....

Here is a simple speed test result of the Firefox lastest version with its predecessors.

18,148ms 3,669ms 1,524ms

Which one you see is fastest? Yes, its the 3.5 version.Do check your current browser's page loading speed right away, and compare the results.


It's due the new Javascript engine called Trace Monkey.

2) The multi-tab browsing, recently closed tabs, recently closed windows.

Many a times I used to accidentally close the Tabs, so might you have, isn't it ? But now, there is an end to this worry, coz Firefox 3.5 has Recently Closed Tab option that contains all the tabs of the last sessions that were closed, accidentally or due to some system crash.

3)Private Browsing

Ah! sometimes you may want to do some private browsing on the net. In this mode no cookies, web forms, or temporary internet files are stored. Therefore no one gets to know about it. Hey ! but hang on , your Internet Server Provider (ISP), will have the record of your surfing- the urls, time and place, so private browsing doesn't mean proxy or anonymous browsing.

4)Embed Media directly into your HTML page

Firefox 3.5 lets you directly embed audio and video, into your HTML page(prior you would require a flash plug-in to play the media). Firefox v3.5 supports HTML5 audio and Ogg Theora, Vorbis and WAV formats. These may sound as jargon for you so lemme simplify it , these are the audio and video compression formats, and for more details you are free to do some googling !! [:)] Here www.canavasdemos you can try out some applications.I tried an HTML5 based application for painting.It looked ditto same as Paint in Windows, but here is online ,so good for Linux users like me.


Some of the other sleek features are:

5)Inbuilt support for various add-ons and plugins

There are loads of add-ons & plugins available on internet that are all compatible with it and can customize the browser to your needs. I have recently used Read It Later add-on which helps me to mark the links that I can read in my leisure. Some of the others that i have used are iMacro, Tweetbin, etc. They all have made my work extremely easy.

6)Drag any of your tabs, outside the browsers screen to open it in a separate window, and opposite is also true which currently no other browser offers.

7)Location Aware Browsing: Tells your geographical location.


8)Compatible for all platforms whether Mac, Windows Xp, Vista, Windows 7 or Linux(any distro-Red Hat,Debian Ubuntu,Mandriva etc.). For Linux based distros tarball files (.tar.bz2) files are available for download. (Anyone who wants to know about the installation process can see the official site or jus lemme know)


There are numerous other features that have been incorporated by the developers in the latest Firefox v3.5 . It's really worth giving a try to enhance your web experience. So go ahead to install and upgrade your current browser with Firefox 3.5

Cheers...
Rohit
Please note: This is my first article, here, so any suggestions for improvement in writing, or any web related article that you would like to have it here please let me know. I'll try my best to come up to your expectation. I'm a beginner in this field so regret any mistake(s).