Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 1 Arrives–Get to Know It

June 18, 2009

From OStatic blogs

Firefox 3.5, Release Candidate 1, has arrived–a couple of days early. You can download it and view the release notes here. I’ve been using every beta of this release, which was originally to be Firefox 3.1, and it’s unquestionably the best browser going. There are over 5,000 new features in it, and it has much faster Javascript performance than previous versions. Our sister blog, WebWorkerDaily, already put it through the SunSpider Javascript benchmarks. Here’s how it performs compared to the beta, and compared to Google Chrome, as well as more details.

Simon Mackie at WebWorkerDaily writes:

"I ran the new RC1 through the Sunspider JavaScript benchmarks. It appears to be about 12 percent faster than beta 4, scoring a time of 2200 ms compared with beta 4’s 2500 ms, but as I didn’t run the tests in parallel you should take that with a large pinch of salt. While it’s not quite as snappy as Google Chrome (by far the quickest browser available, which scores 1500 ms, according to my benchmarks), this new version of Firefox is still a very fast browser."

The speed difference between this version of Firefox and Chrome is very incremental, and, although I like and use Chrome, Firefox still has the enormous advantage of offering me useful extensions. That advantage is only going to increase as Mozilla proceeds with its Jetpack initiative, designed to make it much easier to develop extensions.

As we posted earlier this week, the Mozilla Hacks team has been putting up articles and video demos of how the new Firefox works, including these:

Content-aware image resizing

Geolocation in Firefox 3.5

Add some ambiance to your videos

Stylish text with text-shadow

Beautiful fonts with @font-face

What does Tracemonkey feel like?

Geolocation with open street maps.

Especially if you haven’t been using the beta versions of Firefox 3.5, spend some time viewing the release notes and the demos of this new browser. It’s much improved over previous versions, and, in my opinion, the best browser going.