The latest version of the popular web browser is the fastest and safest yet

Jun 30, 2009 15:40 GMT  ·  By

The latest version of Mozilla's popular web browser Firefox has just been made available to the public. Firefox 3.5 comes after several months of delays but brings some major improvements and new features to make up for it. While the wait has been long and the development schedule went through a large number of testing builds, four betas, a preview release and three release candidates, not to mention all the alpha versions, the latest version is also the fastest and the safest yet.

Its biggest feature is the new “Private Browsing” mode, which allows users to surf without leaving any traces like history, passwords and search bar entries. Designed for special situations when privacy is the main concern, the feature isn't exactly new as it was first introduced by Google's Chrome browser almost a year ago and then later by Internet Explorer 8. UPDATE: The feature was originally introduced in 2005 by Safari for MAC OS X, as commenter John pointed out.

The other big improvement is the new JavaScript engine TraceMonkey, which brings a huge speed increase even over Firefox 3.0. Replacing the older SpiderMonkey, the new engine brings a lot of optimizations but the biggest speed increase comes from the adoption of native code technology, which converts commonly used JavaScript code into binary code that runs natively on the machine's processor. This brings a huge performance boost, allowing web applications to run as fast as native desktop applications and removing one of the biggest hurdles in the adoption of cloud apps.

Another big feature, geolocation, could become a major part of the Internet experience as more web sites adopt the technology. Location-aware browsing allows websites that take advantage of Firefox's capabilities to get information on the users’ location and offer information or targeted services based on it. Under the skins is a new addition that could shape the future of the Internet as Firefox 3.5 will offer full support for all of the features of the proposed HTML 5 standard, like the <video> and <canvas> elements as well as offline data storage.

Firefox 3.5 can be downloaded from here (Windows), here (Linux) or here (MAC OS X).