Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Video

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Video Transcript

[ Music ]

>> Seth Rosenblatt: A year in the making with a trail of four betas, three release candidates, and one name revision behind it, Firefox 3.5, originally known as Firefox 3.1, is now available to the general public. I'm Seth Rosenblatt for CNET Download.com, and in this first look video, I'll show you what's new in 3.5. Most of what's new is under the hood, but that doesn't mean you're not going to notice it. First off, Mozilla has incorporated their new job descript engine making this the fastest Firefox on record. Called Trace Monkey, Firefox 3.5 is on average around three times faster than its predecessor in both loading pages and rendering job descript. It's no longer the fastest browser on the market for rendering job descript, but it's not the slowest either. Another big new feature is private browsing. Firefox isn't the first or even the second browser to come up with a feature that can turn off history, cookies, and other bits of tracking information at will. Mozilla's version is different in that the browser doesn't change its look when you're using private browsing. So if someone looking over your shoulder can't tell if the feature's on or off. You can also delete browsing traces over a recent period of time or for specific sites. So if you don't want someone to see that you've been shopping on Amazon for an engagement ring, but you forgot to turn on private browsing, you can easily remove those from the browser's records. One of the coolest new features in 3.5 is that it supports native aug [phonetic] video content and HTML 5 tags like video and audio. This means that you won't need Flash to watch embedded video on certain sites such as Daily Motion. Geo Location now comes integrated as well. A change in the fall of 2008 to use Google's Geo Location Tech means that when you search for something generic like City Hall, Firefox will roughly know to point you to Pittsburgh, California and not Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There's also support for web workers. So browser-based apps can run in the background, better support for CSS and SVG standard, personas for easier theme management, and downloadable fonts. You can also tear off tabs into separate windows or drag them back into your main window. I'm not a huge fan of this feature, but that might just be because I don't use it that much. One I definitely do use, though, is session restore. In 3.5, you can select which tabs get restored. Finally. Because some of its competitors such as Chrome and Safari handle job descript much faster, if you only use web apps and have no need for add-ons, Firefox might not be the best browser for you. However, speed isn't the only browser bench mark, and there's a reason that Firefox still commands more than 22 percent of the browsing market on PC's. With a first look at Firefox 3.5, I'm Seth Rosenblatt for Download.com [ Music ] ^M00:02:46