RSSFirefox 3.5 gears up for a possible Tuesday public release
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published June 26, 2009, 7:02 PM
A Mozilla spokesperson confirmed to Betanews early this evening that, if all pans out as planned, the organization will officially release the Firefox 3.5 Web browser to the general public as soon as Tuesday, June 30. No longer a beta, users will get the first opportunity to see a completely stable version of Firefox's new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, whose latest new features were demonstrated to us today by two of its engineers.
We're seeing demos that simply are not possible with what officially passes today as the stable Firefox browser -- version 3.0.11 isn't nearly as powerful or as swift. One demo, which testers of Firefox 3.5 RC can see for themselves here, demonstrates the browser's new support for HTML5 with not only embedded video, but JavaScript that can embed graphics or video in the embedded video, in real-time, several frames per second.
"What's important here is that somebody has to take a stand," said Mozilla senior platform engineer Damon Sicore in an interview with Betanews Friday, in response to our question as to what Mozilla is doing to encourage Web developers to adopt development principles such as HTML5 embedded video tags, even though Firefox doesn't have the most usage share. "Somebody has to put open video on the Web. It's important that these formats are unencumbered. We feel that it's something that's in our mission that we have to do to keep them moving forward, in keeping the Web open."
"Video tags have a way to do fallback, so many of these sites can use the video if its supported, or they can fallback to a plug-in such as Flash or Windows Media Player, to actually deliver some type of content to users on other browsers," added Vladimir Vukicevic, infrastructure developer for the Firefox browser. "The nice thing is that, Firefox is sitting at about 30% market share -- in some places in Europe, it's significantly higher. So we actually can rely on users having a good chance of having Firefox, and as our market share trends go up, we think we'll see a lot of pressure come for other browsers to support these [features] as well."
We'll have more of our interview with Sicore and Vukicevic next week.
In what may be one of the last tests of Firefox 3.5 RC3 performance compared to new releases of the Google Chrome 3 and Opera 10 betas, the browser was posting scores that were 246.3% those of Firefox 3.0.11, in Betanews tests of RC3 on a physical Windows 7 platform. Right now, the Betanews relative index score for RC3 for Win7 stands at a flat 9.00 (nine times the performance of Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista), compared to 7.48 for RC3 in Vista SP2, and 9.59 on Windows XP SP3. However, the very last private builds of tweaks to RC3 were posting scores as high as 10.04 in XP.
For some time now Ive always had this grudge against Firefox. Most of my friends never understood my point of view. Opera and IE were always my choice.
Ive been using Opera 10 Beta for some time now and I cannot see any reason to go to Firefox even still to this day.
I however do not knock on Firefox.. its a very stable and fast and famous browser and Mozilla should be very proud of such accomplishments they have made.
The only thing I wish about Opera is that it is more compatible with toolbar such as Norton security bar and things like that.
Kudos to Firefox on there latest milestone!
Score: 1
|Firefox has been my browser if choice for a long time - mainly due to extensions available.
I agree with others that Chrome is good but it won't take Firefox's place for me for the foreseeable future.
HTML5 support is the future - it's quite amazing really.
When ever I "fix" peoples computers for them; Firefox always gets installed and made the default browser.
Score: 0
|I thought browser wars were so 90ish. The only reason IE is #1 is because it happens to be bundled with the only viable OS in the world. If it was Apple XP, #1 would be Safari. If it was Google XP, #1 would be Chrome, etc,etc,etc. This is all so relative. Except in a work environment, 80% of ppl at home use IE ( and some are still using IE 5) to check their e-mail and play solitaire anyway. I agree with someone making browsers safer, but it will only be safe until tomorrow when someone cracks the code. I will bet anyone that within a month of the release of FF 3.5, Mozilla will issue a security patch. I use FF almost exclusively while using IE8 sometimes. It's not that the other browsers are bad, I just happen to like Chevy, Coca Cola, Kelloggs, AND Firefox. Does anyone now get how all this is so relative? With freedom of choice, disagreements will always be a constant.
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|Suppose Mozilla released a new browser and no one cared? I certainly don't. As Chrome matures Firefox will be less of a factor as a browser. Google accounts for about 80% of Mozilla's funding. How long will that last?
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|That funding will last as long as Firefox keeps Google as their primary search engine and as long as Ben Goodger and the others still work on Firefox and Chrome.
Chrome isn't meant to take Firefox's place, per se, but to support Google's online applications in a safe and custom environment. The fact that it works as a free browser without attached services is just a plus. Google is in it for the money, Mozilla isn't.
Score: 1
|I always tended to use the browser that kept me safe on-line. Couple of years back that was easy, I used Opera when the users of that excellent bit of gear could be counted on one hand. Opera was fast and safe, IE was for learners, and we Opera fans laughed at the silly folk who used it. But times have moved on, Firefox, Opera and the rest are continually being recalled for security fixes. However, and correct me if I'm wrong on this but hasn't IE8 only needed one big fix since it arrived ? So if that's the case don't we all now need to show how knowledgeable we are and start using it again, we can then laugh as before at the learners who taking our advice are now all using Firefox. Today we will all be using the reverse thumb system, thumbs down means you agree, up means you disagree. IE8 rocks, are you with me lads ?
Score: -6
|Sure use IE8 if you are locked into the super expensive Microsoft software stack. And if you want to get drive by trojans, viruses, the worst standards support of _any_ browser and the slowest javascript performance of _any_ browser, sure use IE.
Otherwise, no browser can match the features, performance and support of Firefox 3.5. Chrome and Safari are only lacking the plug-in support, otherwise they would be at the top. Google Chrome is a slick piece of kit.
Score: 5
|IE8 has only issued a single security fix, but that doesn't mean that it's only required one. Firefox issues regular security fixes because we believe in ensuring that as new attacks evolve on the web, users are constantly updated and protected. With Microsoft, only the black hats and they know what's vulnerable until they fix things, leaving you exposed.
Score: 6
|sturgess. If you want to be safe while browsing, then disable scripting in all your browsers. noscript with firefox does this, and has been able to block many firefox exploits well before Mozilla patched their browser.
Opera has a very very fast response rate when they do get security vulns.
Score: 1
|Having security fixes within the first month doesn't exactly scream "safe!' to the crowd, does it? Microsoft should have had things like that under control before they released it. The other bugs would have been understandable to fix within that time frame.
I'm still more trusting of Firefox and Opera, simply because of the number of platforms, languages, and the variety of users. Chrome and Safari are probably safer than Internet Exploder but they're niche players now and don't get enough exposure.
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|Didn't the Romans use the reverse thumb system with the Gladiators? Just saying. Firefox 3.5 RC3 user.
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|Gungistoker "Didn't the Romans use the reverse thumb system with the Gladiators?"
They most certainly did Gungisoker, but I'm pleased to see those reading my post are indeed using the historically correct method to show their appreciation of my views, but then again I'd expect nothing less of IE8 users, thanks guys.
Score: 1
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