Mozilla on Monday released Firefox 3.5 beta 4, which is expected to be the last in the beta line before Firefox 3.5 is (finally) released. The previous Beta versions were numbered 3.1 but Mozilla has switched to the 3.5 number on account of its having more significant changes. You can’t really expect wonders from this version, but it certainly looks into some very important privacy and security issues.
The browser wars have recently been becoming more and more fierce, with Microsoft releasing Internet Explorer 8, the hype about Google Chrome and Apple trying to get a strong hold in Windows with Safari.
Some of the major changes introduced in this version are:
- The private browsing mode, which has been in the test pipeline for quite a while now.
- Better performance and stability in javascripts with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
- Built in JSON (Javascript Object Notation) technology for exchanging data between servers and browsers.
- Supports for adding tags to audio and video content.
- Support for technology to let permitted applications know the user’s location.
- Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
- Support for the Web workers standard for letting a browser perform processing in the background without holding back a Web application’s user interface.
The private browsing mode, which has become quite popular in other browsers, lets you choose whether you want Firefox to retain possibly sensitive browsing data with one click. For more details, you can check the release notes here. You can find the download pages for Linux, Mac and Windows here.
