Linux and Open Source

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols & Paula Rooney

First release candidate of Firefox 3.5 posts Friday as expected

By Paula Rooney | June 22, 2009, 12:07pm PDT

The Mozilla team reached a major milestone Friday by making available the first release candidate of Firefox 3.5.

As expected, version 3.5 Release Candidate 2 was released after 4 pm on June 19th.

Earlier in the week, the Firefox team released second builds of RC1 to about 800,000 existing beta testers. On Friday, RC2 became officially available for download.

Mozilla is pitching it as the fastest Firefox ever. But version 3.5 also comes equipped with many features not originally planned for the first update to Firefox 3.0, which shipped last June.

These include private browsing mode, a new TraceMoneky javascxript engine and support for the HTML5 and elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio.

Observers agree that the surprise release of Google’s open source browser called Chome last year altered the release plans and feature set of Firefox 3.X. And though Chome has enjoyed a nice uptick since its introduction, it appears that the first and most popular open source browser has remained strong in terms of market share and support.

According to Net Applications data for this quarter, Firefox holds more than 22 percent market share next to Microsoft Internet Explorer’s 66 percent, while Chrome has amassed just about 1.7 percent market share.

Chris Maresca, an open source consultant, said Firefox is still the preferred browser in the open source community.

“Regarding Chrome — I think the jury is still out,” Maresca said. “What makes Firefox great is the ecosystem and the community. The produce all kinds of addons, extensions and themes that allow people to make it into whatever they want. I don’t know if Google will be able to reproduce this, particularly since the most popular Firefox extensions would take away some of [Google's] business (eg. AdBlock).”

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Mozilla Firefox, Open Source, Release Candidate, Web Browsers, Internet, Paula Rooney

Paula Rooney is a Boston-based writer who has followed the tech industry for almost two decades.

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RE: First release candidate of Firefox 3.5 posts Friday as expected

edward polling Updated - 4th Jul

As expected, version 3.5 Release Candidate 2 was released after 4 pm on June 19th.
Earlier in the week, the Firefox team released second builds of RC1 to about 800,000 existing beta ipad bag blog sutudeg education news and pclos hwdb testers. k l

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HTML5 support

linuser Updated - 22nd Jun 2009

The browser space is REALLY exiting these days!

I can't wait until the final Firefox 3.5 release, so I can start playing with HTML5 video, etc.

HTML5 seems to be shaping up to be the next browser battleground and should lend itself to some great new website & web app designs.

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Yay! Is it soup yet? No? Oh. OK. I guess I can wait some more.

Dietrich T. Schmitz 22nd Jun 2009

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RE: First release candidate of Firefox 3.5 posts Friday as expected

edward polling Updated - 4th Jul

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RE: First release candidate of Firefox 3.5 posts Friday as expected

jwp41@... 23rd Jun 2009

What I want to know is: Does FFox release memory after you close a tab? Currently it is a memory hog.

Bill

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FF 3.5 RC2 Speeds Slow Sites - Overcome Incompatible Add-Ons

dl@... 23rd Jun 2009

So far FireFox 3.5 has been a godsend. Websites that were painfully slow in FF 3.0 open as quickly as can be with FF 3.5 RC2. If you want to test this out, go to http://www.asus.com and pick the United States. In FireFox 3, the subsequent pages took what seemed like forever to load. But in FF 3.5 they load quick as a fox (pun intended).

You will, however, find that a slew of extensions and themes will report they are incompatible with FF 3.5. This "false" incompatibility categorization is easily overcome. Install the extension "Nightly Tester Tools" (available at http://www.oxymoronical.com/web/firefox/nightly) and restart Firefox. You can then right click any add-on that reports it is incompatible and select "Override incompatibility." You can then "force install" the add-on. I've done this for about 20 or so add-ons on four Windows XP computers without any problems. They all work just fine after restarting FireFox 3.5 RC2. (Incompatibility notices are often triggered due to the maximum version of FireFox in the add-on's code, not because the add-on is really incompatible with FF 3.5. There's a complicated way to go into the jar file and change the code, but the Nightly Tester Tool approach is a whole lot easier.)

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I'm not so sure it's wise to override add-on incompatiblility ;

mhenriday 23rd Jun 2009

I've previously seen a lot of problems - browser crashes, etc - caused by doing so. Rather, I should counsel a little patience - the most important add-ons, like Adblock Plus, NoScript, Google Toolbar, and in my case, Delicious Bookmarks, are all perfectly compatible with FF 3,5 RC 2, and other active developers will probably release updates to their products as soon as the Gold version is released, which shouldn't be too long from now....

Henri

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Overriding compatibility not a problem

dl@... 23rd Jun 2009

Your concerns are reasonable, but we've had absolutely no crashing or other misbehavior doing so. If an extension were to cause FF RC2 to crash, just disable it (maybe you can go into FF via its SafeMode to disable to uninstall it temporarily).

But to help play it safe, here's a list of extensions that are working just fine in FF 3.5 RC2. If your extension is on this list, I think you can safely override compatibility. I am sure there are hundreds of other extensions that will also work just fine if you override compatibility (we just don't use them).

* Bookmark Backup 0.4.10
* BugMeNot 2.1
* CLEO 4.1
* ColorfulTabs 3.9.2
* CookieSafe 3.0.5
* CustomizeGoogle 0.76
* CuteMenus - Crystal SVG 1.9.3
* Distrust 0.8.1
* DownloadHelper 4.4.1
* FEBE 6.1
* FireFTP 1.0.4
* Forecastfox 0.9.10.1
* Freecorder Toolbar 2.0.5.3
* Get Mail Plus 3.2
* IE Tab 1.5.20090525
* InfoLister 0.10.1
* Informational Tab 0.3.2009051301
* infoRSS 1.2.0
* Java Console 6.0.14
* Java Quick Starter 1.0
* JavaScript Options 1.2.6
* Menu Editor 1.2.6
* MR Tech Toolkit 6.0.3.3
* Nightly Tester Tools 2.0.2
* NoScript 1.9.3.3
* Password Exporter 1.1
* PDF Download 2.2.0.2
* Personas for Firefox 1.2.1
* Perspectives 3.0.3
* PrefBar 4.1.2
* QuickNote 0.6.0.4
* Save Session 1.3.1.5
* ScrapBook 1.3.3.9
* Speed Dial 0.9.0.8
* Stop-or-Reload Button 0.2.2
* Tab Mix Plus 0.3.7.3
* Tab Scope 0.2.2.11
* Toolbar Buttons 0.6.0.5
* Toolbar Extras 3.4
* Tweak Network 1.3
* Undo Closed Tabs Button 3.0.3
* United States English Dictionary 3.0.3
* Update Notifier 0.1.5.4

I strongly suspect it will take a month or so before all the developers update the "maximum FireFox" in their add-ons to include FF 3.5 -- so this fix will help get you through the wait.