This has been in the works for a little while and Mozilla has been frantic to get it out due to all the stiff competition out there now days.  See Google Chrome 2, Apple’s Safari’s 4, Opera 9, and even Internet Explorer 8 all running amuck in the wild right now & all claiming to be the fastest.  Which is debatable on all fronts, but we won’t get into that today.  I’ve been using Firefox religiously since version 0.5 way back when, and still can’t be pressed away from it.  Yes both Chrome & Safari are a bit faster and sport some better functionality but as a serious day to day browser they can’t touch FF in my opinion.  Firefox is just too robust and I use just about everything it has to offer.  But really in this day in age one browser cannot rule them all…as much as they all want us to believe that.  But I digress…let’s just talk about the new features shall we?  Take a look at this quick video tour and I’ll catch up after the jump.

So as you can see, nothing super revolutionary, but some very cool improvements we can all enjoy.  It’s kind of like having an ice cream cone that gets ripped out of your hands and dipped in caramel and handed back to you.  Yeah, it’s yummy, that’s what I’m saying.  Unless you don’t like caramel then screw that metaphor all together.

So really all in all, its faster, like I said before, that’s worth upgrading by itself.  As it always has, it will blow away any Internet Explorer browser, and now completely keeps up with all the young guns out there.

Something new is the Private Browsing.  You can go to Tools > Start Private Browsing to enter a stealth mode if you will.  All this does is keep any trace of where you’ve been completely cleaned off your computer.  So like that guy says if you want to buy someone a gift but dont want them stumbling onto it…oh PLEASE!  We all know this is to hide the fact you were looking at PORN!  Just keep in mind…this won’t save your ass at work as everything that comes through the internet gets filtered through your works servers.  You can’t hide anything from US…oops, I mean them!  BUT, this new specialty of Firefox is nothing new at all as the other browsers are already doing it these days.  In fact, this version blows compared to the others.  You can’t just pop a new window open from your current session and go stealth.  It switches everything in your current session into Private Browsing…no matter how many tabs you have open.  And if you were writing an e-mail and got distracted to go look at porn…I mean shopping, and you’re not careful it will blow away everything you were working on.  I’m really hoping they get this changed…I just don’t like it.

But I do really like the Forget This Site feature!  Go to Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks > History > Date you’re looking for and find the site you want to get rid of.  It deletes it from your cache, not just your history.  That’s more handy for actually shopping for a gift and wiping it out later I’m thinking.

Forget This Site

There’s a bunch of other stuff as well, Like the Clear Resent History in which you can shred your cache of the last couple of hours or more, but that’s the real basics of it.  They’re really pushing this new Open Video & Audio format too, but as cool as it is, I don’t see it replacing Adobe Flash in any forseeable future.  Then again I never thought anything would sway me away from Yahoo Mail at one time either….GMAIL SAYS HI!

You can see the full run down of new and improved goodies here ->  Firefox Features
Or you can read a more detailed review of it here -> Ars Technica

Or just Go and get it and see for yourself ->  Firefox 3.5

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