When I have attended the <form> function() & .class Web Design Conference, I have heard there that Firefox 3.5 is to be released,.. so when I checked the Mozilla website, it is already available.

Here’s a rundown of what’s new, and some quick tips you might want to know! First things first, it’s amazingly noticeably faster, I didn’t think I’d notice an increase in speed, but wow!

The first thing that comes to mind when you think about upgrading firefox, is what happened last time we updated firefox.  Some of our favorite addons died, even my fasterfox but im very thankful because my Gmail Notifier is still here. Well, this time it’s not that bad, but don’t expect to not lose a few of your friends. Here’s a list of what’s update and what’s not, thanks to mozilla. Compatibility Report

Some of these new features for 3.5 are not really “new” but there what’s now native to the browser, and we love that.

Undo Close Window – Open windows you’ve closed.
Forget this site – Completely remove all evidence of a website you visited.
Tab Tearing – Drag tabs off your main window, to forge new ones.
Private Browsing Mode – No evidence of any website visited will be kept.
Color Profiles – Updated to be display images
GeoLocation – Locationaware browsing.
HTML5 and CSS3 Support – Web webmasters love this.

With location-aware browsing, web pages, addons and firefox applications can use an API to see where you’re located. If you’re like me, and hate that idea. There’s a easy way to disable it. Open up your about:config and locate geo.enabled – set this to false.

Interested in seeing how geolocation works? Here’s a demo: http://3liz.org/geolocation/

Quoted from Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Release Notes

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.