The Tech Daily

The folks at Mozilla have deemed the changes in this incarnation of the popular Firefox browser significant enough to skip the planned version 3.1 and instead bump up the release number to 3.5. And I agree—it's a big improvement. By its appearance, you'd be hard pressed to tell how Firefox 3.5 differs from 3.0, but it's what's inside that counts. The new version speeds up JavaScript performance and catches up with other recent browsers like Internet Explorer 8, Opera 10, and Safari 4 by adding a private browsing mode. And 3.5 builds on everything you everything that made the previous versions of Firefox great, like the myriad extensions and themes and the "awesome" address bar for quickly getting where you're going on the Web. The result? An impressive piece of software gets even better.


I like Firefox 3.5's new New Tab button, which takes a page from Internet Explorer and Opera's playbook with a plus sign that makes it more obvious how to add a new tab. You can also now grab a tab and drag it into a new window on the desktop—or drag a window back into the open browser. The page appears as a large thumbnail while you do this. Safari, Chrome 2, and Opera all can do this, but IE8 still can't. Firefox is the last holdout to offer only a blank white page on new tabs: All other modern browsers display history, recently closed tabs, and favorites. Finally, in an appealing new touch, when you open a new tab in Firefox 3.5, the existing ones slide to the left.

Firefox already had an "Open recently closed tabs" choice, but 3.5 can reopen recently closed windows, too, so even if you've closed a whole browser window you haven't lost its tabs.
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Unlike most of the competition, Firefox displays no indication when you're in the new private browsing mode—IE shows an InPrivate graphic in the address bar, and Chrome displays a private eye icon. When you start Firefox's private browsing mode, your existing tabs disappear, but they return when you turn off the mode. I had to reconnect to Outlook Web Access after a private session, though I'd been logged in before. Nothing from my private session appeared in history or in the awesome bar, which is how it should be.

You can also have the browser forget any site in your history. A new twist in clearing private data is that it's no longer an all-or-nothing proposition: Firefox 3.5's Clear Recent History lets you tell the browser just to clear history, cache, cookies, logins, and so on for the past hour, two hours, four hours, or whole day, or for your entire history. This is more control than the old Clear Private Data offered.

One nitpick of mine is that the sidebar isn't as accessible as the ones in Internet Explorer and Opera, which offer button access. This handy panel can show history or bookmarks, but you can only get to it if you know the keyboard combination, by customizing your toolbars, or by choosing it from the View menu. In Opera, the sidebar performs a multitude of functions as well, such as downloads, notes, and widgets.

Source: PC Mag

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