Firefox 3.5 Released

[griffonwing]

Too bad there is no ONE perfect browser. Some browser will come up with something, have a certain look, behave a certain way that appeals to a specific individual.

[Wetdogeared]

I tried Firefox 3.5 but returned to 3.2 since Norton hasn't got their act together and made their 360 toolbar available yet.
I usually have both Firefox and Chrome up and running for different functions.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by griffonwing

Wow.. take a breath there!

Opera auto-saves your session, and you load up all the windows where you last left them.

It also has a new trash feature that, if you close a window, it's not lost. You dont have to go to the History and see the last website youve been to. You can just click on the trash can and open up any window that you closed since the session began.

Especially if you accidentaly closed a window 3 hours before, and only now need that website again. 2 clicks and it's back up. Very handy.

firefox has that too. and chrome, to its credit, does make it easy to restore closed tabs and open the sites you visit the most often ; when you open a new tab, the page shows you the 9 most visited sites and you can click on them. to the side, it also lists the most recent favorites, search fields, and most recently closed (individual tabs, and complete windows). nonetheless, i don't see my preferences changing in the near future.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by griffonwing

Too bad there is no ONE perfect browser. Some browser will come up with something, have a certain look, behave a certain way that appeals to a specific individual.

actually i see that as a good thing, since different users have different preferences and needs. much like i'm glad for the variety of liseuses available, since i might have different priorities than someone else.

Originally Posted by Wetdogeared

I tried Firefox 3.5 but returned to 3.2 since Norton hasn't got their act together and made their 360 toolbar available yet.
I usually have both Firefox and Chrome up and running for different functions.

me too.

[Dylrob]

Originally Posted by griffonwing

1) Never heard of Net Captor. What is an IE shell anyway? It certainly wasn't in any IE updates, not that I ever updated to,

2) IBrowse? myIE2, MultiZilla? Are all of these shells for IE and Netscape/Firefox?

I'm guessing these were plug-ins?)

A shell is more than a plug-in. It's an application that uses the basic rendering engine ("Trident" or "Gecko" for IE or Mozilla respectively), but replaces the entire interface.

[BlackVoid]

Eh, I just downgraded to FF 2.0. 3.0 is bloatware compared to 2.0 which is fast and compact. I may try 3.5 on my laptop....

[Jaime_Astorga]

Aaaand we have started to get some early screenshots of Firefox 4.0!

http://mashable.com/2009/07/27/firefox-40/


Seems like they are making it more like Chrome. Here's an official response to common opinions.

Hi, Alexander Limi from the Firefox User Experience team here.

Let me try to clear up some common questions that are raised here — and feel free to ask more questions, I'll try to keep an eye on replies to this comment. Some of these are taken from the Reddit thread, since it hit there a little bit earlier, I hope you don't mind me re-using my answers.

"I really like this, but hope that all the interface customization ability stays in place" — That is indeed one of our goals with this. You should be able to go back to something very, very close to what you're using right now, regardless of what that is.

"I love tabs on top! / I hate tabs on top!" — Fortunately, we want to support both. What we ship with as the default isn't decided yet, but it's pretty clear that there are compelling reasons to have both available as options.

"It looks just like Chrome! Where's the innovation?" — Chrome was not the first browser to have tabs on top, not the first browser to have glyphs instead of icons for the buttons, etc. If you read the proposal, there's a lot of new interesting things hidden here (home tab, progress bar, the stop/reload/go combination), but it's not all expanded on at once. Just because another browser has something, doesn't mean we *have* to do it differently. There's a lot of cool things in all the major browsers these days.

"Why are they doing this instead of focusing on speed and memory usage optimizations?" — Because they are done by different people, and once does not preclude the other. We can do both, and there's a lot of effort invested in stuff like this as we speak — vastly improved startup time for Firefox 3.6, etc. Follow the Mozilla blogs at planet.mozilla.org if you want the inside scoop.

"Whoever thought it was a good idea to remove the menu bar?" — Quite a number of other browsers. But to give you a proper answer, the amount of functionality you use in day-to-day use of the browser really isn't that large, so having a dedicated bar for the menu makes less sense. On the Mac side, things work differently, and the menu bar will probably stay in place, as the OS X user interface has a different approach to menus.

Also, we have some cool s—t lined up for this that isn't in these mock-ups yet.

"I think tabs on the side or having no tabs at all is a better approach" — We want to support this too. See the article on this here: http://limi.net/articles/reinventing-tabs-for-the- ...

Let me know if you have other questions! I'll keep an eye out and try to answer as many as I can.

— Alexander Limi · Firefox User Experience

[kenmark]

Happy Birthday Firefox

THE OPEN SOURCE BROWSER Firefox celebrates its fifth birthday today.

Firefox was released by the Mozilla Foundation on November 9, 2004 and was immediately so popular that demand promptly crashed the server. The outfit spent an hour trying to get everything online again.

[Dylrob]

Originally Posted by kenmark

Happy Birthday Firefox

To clarify November 9, 2004 is when version 1.0 was released. A lot of us were using the beta versions long before that.

[hodad66]

I just love Firefox!!