Firefox 3.5 - First look review

Firefox 3.5 is out for general release and has been available for download for over a week now but before you rush for the download button - read this review first!

If you don't read any of this review other than this top bit, I'd make a couple of recommendations first - don't upgrade to 3.5 yet. Especially if you use a distribution like Ubuntu, Fedora Core or SuSE that ships with FireFox. You should wait until your distributor makes the update available via their system update mechanism. People who rushed to download the binaries from the website have been finding all sorts of issues with stability, font rendering and a few other issues here and there.

Let's not get all doom and gloom about this release though. These problems will invariably be sorted out very quickly - here are some of the great new features present in Firefox 3.5:

• Super fast JavaScript engine, making web pages render a lot faster than before.
• New privacy surfing option, ala porn mode, first seen in Google Chrome.
• HTML 5 Video support.
• Geolocation API for location aware websites.
• Ogg Theora/Vorbis built in for non patent-encumbered high quality video/audio support.
• Option to reopen closed tabs and also better crash management.

Let's look into the new javascript engine a bit more. As far as we can make out, Mozilla have replaced the JS engine with a new one called TraceMonkey. The claims made on the TraceMonkey wiki page state "The net result [of using TraceMonkey] is a massive speed increase both in the browser chrome and Web‐page content.".

Indeed, things certainly look good. Here are the results of the SunSpider speed tests:

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

In reality, the speed increase is noticeable, but not vastly improved over FF3, so we'd reckon the change is more evolutionary than revolutionary - Mozilla's brag of it being twice as fast as FF3 is perhaps apparent on paper, but the real life user won't see as big a change as he or she did when they upgraded from FF2.

Next, onto the Privacy Mode, available in the tools menu, this option opens a new set of tabs and whilst Privacy Mode is enabled, all of the sites visited will be forgotten as soon as Privacy Mode is ended. All history of that Private session is removed, cache zapped and cookies munched. This feature first made it big onto the web surfing scene in Google's Chrome which isn't available as a stable release for Linux yet (it's coming though). It was quickly (yet fondly) referred to as the pr0n mode. Now FF users can join in the divorce-saving surfing, so I guess this is a thumbs up!

Firefox 3 has made big inroads into being a standards compliant HTML 5 browser. Although Mozilla had originally tried to get HTML 5 Video support into Firefox 3, it ended up being a bigger struggle than they originally planned, however it's now here in (most of it's) glory. Combine this with inbuilt support for the non-patent encumbered Ogg Vorbis/Theora format and FF 3.5 is the most multimedia friendly browser yet. HTML 5 Video works pretty well and so too does the Ogg Video support, so again a thumbs up here.

Something that's been missing in traditional deskopt type web browsers, where the Smartphone and sometimes netbook market has been excelling in, is location aware surfing. There is an ever-growing number of websites out there, as well as advertising schemes that take advantage of browser based location information. Firefox no longer requires any add-ons to be geo-location aware. Simply click the button to allow FireFox to publish your location, and location aware websites can use this information to serve up more localised information to you. If you've used the iPhone before and liked all that location stuff, then this is a step in that direction. It's a nice feature that isn't really in any other browser as standard, so it's still nice to see Firefox break the innovation barrier again.

Finally, I'll finish with stability. I've tried out Firefox 3.5 on both Linux and Mac OS X since it's release and I've got a few jibes about general stability. Overall, the browser has crashed on me over both platforms no less than eight times. In the same amount of time, FF3 wouldn't have crashed once. I wasn't doing anything special at the time either - dropping down selection items from a standard HTML form, or closing a tab I was no-longer interested in. It's definitely got some bugs there. Your mileage may vary and it might be a whole lot more stable for you, but I would wait just a little longer for the Mozilla team to iron out the bugs. By the time that happens, you'll probably find that your distributor, be it Ubuntu, Fedora or SuSE will have released FF 3.5 within their package management or system update software. However, every cloud has a silver lining - Firefox 3.5 does handle crashes a lot better than previous versions of Firefox. When you open up the browser after a crash, it lets you know what tabs you had open the last time, and allows you to re-open all, or some of them again.

In conclusion

Firefox 3.5 does seem like a nice upgrade. There are at least four things in there that will make it seem a worthwile update for the majority of savvy web surfers. I am confident that Mozilla will fix the stability issues very quickly (probably within 4 weeks), but until then, I'd hold off on getting it until your distributors make it available.