14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla is expected to release the final version of Firefox 3.5 tomorrow, following a tumultuous development cycle. After four betas, a preview version and three release candidates the browser is finally ready for the public, six months after it was initially planned.
At first designed as a small, incremental release, dubbed 3.1 and expected to be launched last December, several delays and the growing number of added features have made the Mozilla team move up the version number to 3.5. “As was discussed at the delivery meeting yesterday, we're proposing to change the version number of Shiretoko from 3.1 to 3.5. The increase in scope represented by TraceMonkey and Private Browsing, plus the sheer volume of work that's gone into everything from video and layout to places and the plugin service make it a larger increment than we believe is reasonable to label “.1”.” Mozilla engineer Mike Shaver said about the change.
One of the most important new features to be introduced in 3.5 is the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which offers big performance increases even moving from Firefox 3.0. TraceMonkey brings native code to Firefox for the first time by converting frequently used portions of the script to native machine code which is executed directly for the processor. This coupled with other optimizations makes TraceMonkey several times faster, in some cases, than SpiderMonkey, the JavaScript engine in Firefox 3.0.
The other major feature that got a lot of development work is Private Browsing, which both Chrome and IE8 are already sporting, and which will allow users to enter a temporary state where no user information like cookies, history or temporary files will be stored locally. Behind the scenes a lot of work has also been done to support open standards like the proposed HTML 5 standard, which adds many new features like the “video” or “canvas” tags bringing RIA functionality to standard HTML code.
While waiting for the final release you can get the latest Firefox 3.5 RC3 right here.