Mozilla Releases Major Version 3.5 Beta 4
The Mozilla folks have been hard at work on the Firefox beta and have released a new version with big enough changes to warrant a new 3.5 version number. The Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 version has the following improvements, according to Mozilla:
- This beta is now available in 70 languages — get your local version.
- Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
- Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
- The ability to provide Location-Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.
- Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
- Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
- Support for new web technologies such as: HTML5 and elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.
Please note that this is a beta so it might not be as polished as a full release. Note also that your Firefox add-ons may not be compatible with this new beta. You can download the new version here.
Looks like they intend to widen the gap from IE8. I think IE is not even visible in the FF rear view mirror anymore.
TraceMonkey says, “Eat My Dust”.
I’d like to upgrade, but most of the great add-ons don’t show compatible, like evernote, foxmarks, your reading list, etc. I’ll wait a few days.
Use Nightly Tester Tools, which can force compatibility.
Most plugin makers don’t bother updating until the new versions hit release candidate stage… especially since every 3.x beta has brought chaotic changes to the table.