Hands On With FireFox 3.5
2009
FireFox 3.5
FireFox 3.5 was released last week to the pleasure of the FireFox fan masses. Here is my experience using FireFox 3.5.
Disclaimer: I am a new, yet pretty loyal user of Safari 4 and have rarely ever used FireFox so my opinions may be biased but I will try to keep a level head.
When first starting FireFox 3.5, I was greeted with a dialog box that let me know that FireFox was running in safe mode. I am not sure if this is due to the version change or the fact that the last time I quit FireFox (3.0) on my computer, it may have crashed.
The first test FireFox 3.5 passed was that it was able to render this website (aaronhollman.com) correctly. Its always good to know that a web browser your testing can display your site appropriately.
Having the tab bar enabled by default was a plus. I seem to remember having to set that manually in both Camino and Safari when I started using them for the first time.
FireFox 3.5, like Safari before it, includes the option of Private Browsing (aka porn-mode) This is a feature I believe every browser out there should have. It is a feature that is so much more useful than just surfing for porn. On public machines, it should be a requirement if you are going to be doing any online banking, site maintenance, e-mail, social-networking or working with any accounts that require a login (though I don’t recommend doing any of these on public machines)
The security features of FireFox 3.5 seem to be pretty up-to-date. They take care to protect the user while at the same time, not making them feel like an idiot. More advanced users can turn these features off, but I don’t see why they would. Even the best of us can sometimes fall prey to a well engineered social attack.
FireFox 3.5, like previous versions of FireFox has been designed for add-ons. This is a nice feature if you are the kind of user that likes to customize the way you surf the web. The more popular add-ons, like Adblock Plus, Grease Monkey, and Google Toolbar still work in version 3.5 but there have also been reports of add-ons not working in the new version of FireFox such as Better G-Mail 2 and Google Gears. (For a more detailed list, click here: Firefox add-ons: Which work in 3.5? | The Download Blog – Download.com)
Here are the results I came up with for running a couple of basic benchmark tests with FireFox 3.5. The new version achieved a 93/100 rating on the Acid3 Test. This is a significant improvement over FireFox 3.0 which managed to muster a 71/100.
FireFox 3.5 made improvements on the Celtic Kane javascript benchmark test as well. It achieved a 339ms runtime speed. This is a slight improvement over its old runtime speed of 429ms.
These tests were done on a 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac running Mac OS X 10.5.7. Only one browser window was open at the time. Your results may vary.
Conclusion: It is better, but I’m sticking with Safari 4.
The Acid3 Test
Web Browser Javascript Benchmark | Celtic Kane Online
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