Tuesday, Jun 30, 2009    Text size: 

The release of the newest version of the challenger to Internet Explorer's throne comes after three preliminary, or "release," candidates, which tech companies release to the masses for debugging purposes.

So far, the new browser is getting good reviews. Tech analyst Farhad Manjoo of Slate.com praised its improved speed and next-generation support for the fifth version of HTML, the base programming framework for the Internet.

"The best thing about the new Firefox is that it gives us a peek at the Internet of tomorrow," he said. "Since 2007, the World Wide Web Consortium, the international standards body that sets common technical definitions for the web, has been working on HTML 5, an update to the coding language that defines every page you visit online. Although the consortium has yet to publish its final specifications for the new standard, many browser companies have been incorporating features of the language in their latest releases. Firefox 3.5 offers the best implementation of the standard."

Firefox 3.5 constitutes a major competitor for the industry-leading Flash video format. Anyone who's played a YouTube video is familiar with the Flash format, but the new version of Firefox comes packaged with support for the open-source video formats Ogg Vorbis and Theora. The video-sharing site DailyMotion.com is available in these new formats.

"If this takes off, Flash video could be come history," TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld said, adding that these open-source video solutions offer filmmakers and developers new and improved support for interactive elements that they can add directly into videos. Schonfeld said that Flash can support some of these bells and whistles, but that it's much easier to include such interactive content into open-source video formats.

"Being able to treat the content inside videos like web pages opens up a whole new world of possibilities for web video," he said.

In addition, users can tell Firefox their physical location, and Google will keep track of it, all without installing any extra browser plugins.

As in previous releases, Firefox 3.5 will offer a private browsing feature, aka a "porn mode."

Of less interest to the adult industry is Firefox's new support for font, specifically downloaded ones.