Firefox 3.5: The Technologizer Review

The browser that reignited the browser wars is back--and still the most well-rounded one around.

By  |  Tuesday, June 30, 2009 at 4:06 am

Web Standards

New Web standards inevitably suffer from the classic chicken-or-the-egg conundrum: Most sites won’t support them until major browsers do, which means that browsers end up supporting standards before there’s much tangible reason for consumers to care much about them. Among Firefox 3.5’s forward-looking features is the ability to download fonts specified by Web pages and native support for audio and video playback as specified by the nascent HTML 5 standard, no Flash or other plug-ins required.

Here’s Dailymotion’s experimental Flash-free video site–which looks like any Flash-based video hub but works only in Firefox 3.5 for the moment.

Dailymotion HTML 5 Video

And you’ve got Firefox 3.5 already, you need to check out this demo that inserts images–including any text you type–into a video scene and animates them.

HTML 5 Demo

The existing HTML 5 video demos are enough to convince me that it could be very cool if video were simply a core element of the Web rather than something bolted on via Flash or SilverLight. But for most of us, there’s little immediate benefit from these new features–the overwhelming majority of the Web’s video remains in Flash format, for instance, and much of Mozilla’s argument for the superiority of HTML 5 video (it doesn’t require licenses or royalty payments) is aimed at developers and site proprietors, not consumers. Still, nifty new browser technologies have to start somewhere. And if the new stuff that Firefox 3.5 enables catches on over the next few years, we’ll be grateful that this upgrade got things rolling.

Firefox 3.5 vs. the Competition

Not only are there more viable browsers than ever, but they’re more competitive, too. There are legitimate reasons to favor Chrome, Flock, IE, Opera, or Safari, and I wouldn’t argue the point if you told me that any one of those browsers spoke to you in ways that Firefox doesn’t.

Today’s most interesting browser isn’t Firefox–it’s Chrome, with its spare user interface and total focus on making Web apps run seamlessly. The most feature-rich browser continues to be Opera–and with the new Unite server technology, Opera is being daring in a way that Mozilla isn’t. The Mozilla-based Flock is the only browser built for today’s hottest Web trend: social networking. If you use OS X, you’re most likely to run Safari; if you plan to upgrade to Windows 7, you’ll get IE 8 as part of the package (unless you’re in Europe). All of which is just fine.

But as I said at the start of this review, Firefox remains the most well-rounded browser overall. Despite Microsoft’s introduction of Web Slices and Accelerators and Google’s baby steps towards making Chrome customizable through extensions, Firefox’s library of thousands of add-ons remains a unique asset. If a browser can do something, chances are there’s a free add-on that lets Firefox do it; it’s a little akin to the power of the iPhone’s 50,000-app store. (Note: Not all Add-Ons will be compatible with Firefox 3.5 out of the gate, but most major ones already work.) Firefox’s interface has barely changed, but it remains sleek and well thought out. And 3.5’s enhancements get Firefox back in the game in several areas where other browsers had jumped ahead.

Bottom line: If you seek browser advice from me and we’re not in a hurry, I may assess your particular needs and suggest something other than Mozilla’s browser. But if time is of the essence, I’ll happily give the six-word recommendation I’ve provided countless times since 2004: You won’t go wrong with Firefox.

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25 Comments For This Post

  1. Evan Says:
    June 30th, 2009 at 5:11 am

    Nice review. Do current extensions work, or do they need to be updated.

  2. Rimantas Says:
    June 30th, 2009 at 5:36 am

    Safari 10 beta? What’s that?

  3. Anon Says:
    June 30th, 2009 at 6:12 am

    hahaha Safari 10?

    Safari 4 on my machine got around 550 in Sunspider, FF3.5 got around 1100.

    In V8v4, Safari 4 got around 3000, FF3.5 got around 300.

  4. Rafael E. Belliard Says:
    June 30th, 2009 at 6:15 am

    “Two new options on the History menu let you re-open tabs and windows you’ve recently closed.”

    FYI, the ability to open recently closed tabs has been on firefox at least since Firefox 3.0. Great review, though. 🙂

    http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/2523/firefox3recentlytabs.jpg

  5. Don Clark - Atlanta, GA Says:
    June 30th, 2009 at 6:25 am

    The only reason that I (and many of my coworkers) havent switched to chrome is that we have grown so attached to the Add-ons for Firefox. I did have a love affair with Opera for a couple of years, but I have been happily engaged to Firefox for over 5 years now.

  6. Rafael E. Belliard Says:
    June 30th, 2009 at 6:28 am

    Agreed with Clark. Firefox add-ons are its real killer-app. Adblock, Mail managers, Foxmarks, Firebug, Flashgot, et al. That’s why Opera never stood a chance with me.

  7. Spellcheck Says:
    June 30th, 2009 at 7:58 am

    sorry to nitpick, but the proper spelling is “shoo-in,” not “shoe-in”
    (see: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shoo-in and http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/shoo-in)

  8. AMSR Says:
    June 30th, 2009 at 8:18 am

    Safari 10 beta? You mean Safari 4 Release? /confused

  9. John Baxter Says:
    June 30th, 2009 at 8:37 am

    On the Mac where I’ve been gently kicking the 3.5RC series’ tires, the browser seemed to convert itself automatically to 3.5 when I started it this morning.

    Being the nasty suspicious type that I am, I downloaded a fresh copy. which turned out to be a few thousand bytes smaller. I’ve replaced what was there with the downloaded form (which stayed the same size when launched and quit.

    I suspect that is a distinction without a difference, though.

  10. Tonio Loewald Says:
    June 30th, 2009 at 9:41 am

    I just tried Sunspider on my XP SP3 32-bit machine with the latest Safari 4 and Firefox 3.5 and got *dramatically* different results: overall — Safari 4 1.5x faster. Are you perhaps running a 64-bit version of Mozilla against a 32-bit version of Safari?

  11. Harry McCracken Says:
    June 30th, 2009 at 9:55 am

    @tonio: Nope, 32-bit versions of Firefox 3.5 and Safari on a 32-bit OS (Windows XP). I’ll keep an eye out for what others report…

    Thanks,

    –Harry

  12. fred buddemeyer Says:
    June 30th, 2009 at 12:24 pm

    wordtolb this review is rated 8.9 overall subject=harry mccraken evaluator=fred buddemeyer

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    June 30th, 2009 at 12:53 pm

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  15. jagraham Says:
    June 30th, 2009 at 3:31 pm

    Just installed the new 3.5 update and I haven’t noticed a huge difference in speed, a little faster perhaps, but on average it doesn’t seem to be 2.5 times faster. I do like some of the little tweaks though; the ‘awesome bar’ seems a little smoother and the ‘private browsing’ matches that of IE8. The time Firefox takes to start up is a bit of a pain still though and it still uses quite a bit more RAM than IE, but that’s something I can put up with.

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    July 1st, 2009 at 5:25 am

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    July 1st, 2009 at 9:30 am

    Anyway, here’s a more in-depth review.Thanks

  18. Slym Says:
    July 20th, 2009 at 1:27 am

    This is really a great review and beneficial too.
    I will work on it and explore it further. firefox nowdays is an essential utility to surf internet in easy and fast way. I am lovin it

  19. Prakash Says:
    August 27th, 2009 at 7:11 am

    Hello people,
    I have been using the FF 3.5 since two weeks. While it is a faster browser than the previous one, it is at the same time not so stable. Like i am using the google mail and it does not load the editor window while composing a mail. In this way the previous version was better.
    Hope the programmers fix this problem with the next version.
    Except that i thank the mozilla team for their great service.

    Prakash

  20. Coach Says:
    November 29th, 2009 at 7:00 pm

    I’ve been a user of Firefox since v1 and now am on a crusade to convert all my site visitors to Firefox from IE.

    Many visitors complain that my sites slow down or that the browser ‘freezes’ when visiting my site, in addition to multiple security warnings. I now realise that most of these visitors experience this because they are using the default IE browser. Once they switch to Firefox or Chrome, these problems disappear!

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    Incandescent light bulbs will soon be phased out because they waste a lot of energy.,*~

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