Firefox 3.5
v.3.5, released June 30th, 2009
Check out what’s new, the known issues and frequently asked questions about the latest version of Firefox. As always, you’re encouraged to tell us what you think, either using this feedback form or by filing a bug in Bugzilla.
Well people, the day we’ve been waiting for is finally here. Mozilla Firefox 3.5 has gone official and is available for download from Mozilla’s site!
Firefox 3.5 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use. Some of the notable features are:
- Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)
- Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)
- Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
- Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
- The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)
- 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: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.
Developers can find out about all the changes and new features at the Mozilla Developer Center.
Mozilla provides Firefox 3.5 for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X in a variety of languages. You can get the latest version of Firefox 3.5 here. For builds for other systems and languages not provided by Mozilla.org, see the Contributed Builds section at the end of this document.
Thanks to Mozilla!
A third and most likely final Firefox 3.5 release candidate is already in the works (currently on build 2) with some retouches to the Firefox icon, localization corrections, and a few performance tweaks here and there.
The 16×16 version of the Firefox icon looks much better known (as you can see in the image below FF3, RC2, an interim version, and RC3), the icon shadow has been moved a little to the left on Mac OS X to better blend with OS generated shadow, and some pixelation has been removed from the 512 x 512 version.
Since the changes are pretty trivial, it won’t require a new QA cycle as it usually takes, so the new RC most likely won’t affect the targeted final release date by the end of June (next week).
(Courtesy of Mozillalinks)
You can’t grab it directly, but Mozilla is releasing a “Preview” of its long-awaited Firefox 3.5 release. Download Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 and hit the Help->Check for Updates menu, and you’ll move up to the “Preview” release—not quite a Release Candidate, but somewhere up from betas. As for the Preview itself, it contains stability and JavaScript fixes, better support for Ogg-coded audio and video, and a few other efficiencies. The Release Candidate, meanwhile, is still slated for tomorrow, so this looks to be something like an almost-there nightly build. Tell us what you think of 3.5’s Preview in the comments.
Also for everybody thats still sporting Firefox 3.0.10; An update to 3.0.10 is out! Mozilla has released Firefox 3.0.11 to servers, adding your run-of-the-mill security and stability fixes and fixing up a bug that had prevented some extensions from working properly. If you prefer the “Check for Updates” route, you’ll need to wait a bit for Mozilla to flip the switch on their servers; if you want to grab the update right now, you can find it on various online resources. Hit the full bug list for a closer look at every change
(Courtesy of lifehacker)
This year marks the 40th anniversary of an important milestone in internet history — the development and successful link of the first host-to-host internet connection.
On April 7 1969, Steve Crocker of UCLA circulated around a memo entitled ‘Request for Comments, the first of thousands of “RFCs” documenting the design of ARPANET and the Internet. A few months and many memos and experiments later, in October, 1969, Charley Kline at UCLA sent the first packets on ARPANET as he tried to connect to Stanford Research Institute. Below, a copy of the transmission log.
(Courtesy of BoingBoing & Happy Cinco de Mayo!)
It’s either my worst nightmare or the dawn of a wonderful new future, but scientists are claiming that it’s very possible that the internet could become self-aware and know exactly what you’re looking at.
The claim comes courtesy of New Scientist, as part of their “Unknown Internet” series of articles. Worryingly enough, they quote chairman of the Artificial General Intelligence Research InstituteBen Goertzel as suggesting that a self-aware internet may already be here:
“The internet behaves a fair bit like a mind [already, i]t might already have a degree of consciousness… The outlook for humanity is probably better in the case that an emergent, coherent and purposeful internet mind develops.”
Others, such as Francis Heylighen, research professor at the Free University of Brussels, don’t share such optimism, but do think that we’re not that far off from a conscious web, no matter how disappointing that may be:
“Adding consciousness is more a matter of fine-tuning and increasing control… than a jump to a wholly different level [but w]e probably would not notice a whole lot of a difference, initially.”
(Courtesy of NewScientist)
(Image courtesy of Imagesource/Getty)
“Yahoo Inc is shutting down GeoCities, a free service that hosts personal home pages for consumers, which it acquired for more than $4 billion 10 years ago during the heyday of the dotcom boom….
For more information visit the Forbes website for the entire artice.
