New Features in Firefox 3.5

The release candidate of Firefox 3.5 is now available for download. The RC is a preview of Firefox’s upcoming browser 3.5 which is expected to be released by the end of June 2009. UPDATE: Firefox 3.5 Final version is now available for download. Here is a look at Top features of Firefox 3.5.

What’s new in Firefox 3.5

1. Private Browsing Mode

Mozilla does not want Firefox left behind in Private Browsing. Following the likes of Internet Explorer’s InPrivate Browsing and Google Chrome’s private browsing in an Incognito Window, Firefox 3.5 now has the option of a Private Browsing mode. When you need to work on some one else’s computer or a public kiosk machine for a while, you need not worry about deleting all the browsing history and other private data like cookies and saved passwords before you exit the PC.

Firefox now takes care of all that when you browse the web in ‘Private Browsing’ mode. All your tracks will be removed once you exit out of this mode by closing the window or closing Firefox.

In order to browse the web without leaving any traces go to Tools –> Start Private Browsing

2. Newly Designed Privacy Preferences

The Privacy Tab in the Options Window now gives users finer granularity in controlling their private information. Users can choose to retain or discard individually browsing history, cookies, downloads, and form field information. Also now you can specify whether you want Firefox to include history and/or bookmarks in the address (location) bar’s automated suggestions. This way you can stop some urls from appearing in the address bar.

3. More Control for deleting Recent History

‘Clear Private Data’ in Options Menu is now replaced with ‘Clear Recent History’. This can also be accessed from the ‘Privacy’ tab as seen in the image below. Using this feature, you can delete history for the last 1, 2, 4 hours or the last one day or everything.

4. Forget About This Site

This very handy feature Firefox 3.5’s history browser offers a convenient way to “Forget a site completely”. In order to delete all your browsing history for a particular website

1. Open your browsing history from History –> Show All History.

2. Right Click on an entry and choose ‘Forget About This Site‘. This will delete all entries belong to that domain. However this feature does not cover subdomains.

5. Open Recently Closed Windows

Along with the already existing ‘Recently Closed Tabs‘ option from History Menu, Firefox 3.5 includes the new ‘Recently Closed Windows‘ option. So the next time you accidentally close a window, Firefox will restore the window with all the tabs in place.

6. Tab Bar Enhancement

New Tab Button: Almost all other browsers like Internet Explorer 7 , Opera, Google Chrome has an option to open a new tab button on the tab bar. Firefox 3.5 now includes this convenient feature. Tear Tab Feature: In 3.5, you can do more by dragging and dropping tabs. When you drag and drop a tab, it becomes a new window. You can do this without drag and drop by choosing ‘Open in a New Window’ from the right-click menu. You can also move tabs between windows by dragging and dropping to organize them the way you want. Whenever you drag and drop tabs, Firefox 3.5 shows a nice thumbnail view of the web page that you are moving.

7. Enhancements to Address Bar

The Address Bar now shows a prompt text which says ‘Search Bookmarks and History‘ whenever you open a new tab.

Also, the Auto Suggestions feature of the Address (Location) bar is now enhanced to support filters for the search using special characters. For example typing ‘downloads #’ shows all urls which contain the word ‘Downloads’ in them.

8. HTML 5 Audio and Video Support

 

Firefox 3.5 now supports embedded video and audio using the audio and video HTML tags in the open Ogg format, as well as WAV for audio. This means that you don’t need any plugins like the Flash Player in order to watch videos. Media can now be integrated into a web page without any external help. Also, the right click options for the embedded video allow you Pause, Play and even save the ogg video! As of now this video is supported only for the Ogg format. Let us hope it extends to other media formats in the future.

9. Location aware browsing

Some websites provide services and information to users depending on their geographic location. Firefox 3.5 informs you when you come across such a geo-location enabled site. You can then choose if you want to share your information with the website or not, thus protecting your privacy. Firefox uses Google Location Services to provide this service.

10. Performance Improvements

Firefox 3.5 boasts of a 2 times more speed than it’s predecessor Firefox 3.0 with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. Google Chrome 2.0 was the fastest browser in our tests in comparison to Firefox 3.0.

11. Firefox 3.5 has a new glassy icon. Download Firefox 3.5 

Check out the overview video of Firefox 3.5