Mozilla Releases Firefox 3.5

Mozilla launched its latest browser, Firefox 3.5, Tuesday. This release adds new functionality, some performance improvements, new customization options, and increased support for some of the new web standards. "Firefox 3.5 brings together the most innovative web technologies and delivers them in the most complete and powerful modern browser," says Mozilla CEO John Lilly. "So much is happening on the web right now, it's a great time for browsers."

The new version of Firefox got off to a fast start with reports of more than 1.1 million downloads on the first day of availability. Firefox is already the number 2 browser worldwide, trailing only Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE).

Originally, Mozilla had planned to release a minor update (version 3.1) to the Firefox browser, but decided to release the product as Firefox 3.5 instead, which is considered a "major" release. 3.5 adds a new "Private Browsing Mode" (similar to IE 8's "InPrivate" feature) and support for the next generation HTML 5 standard.

Mozilla also claims that 3.5, because of its improved JavaScript engine (labelled "TraceMonkey"), is "two times faster than Firefox 3.0 and ten times faster than 2.0 on complex websites". I chuckle at vague performance claims that can be neither confirmed or denied in any kind of testing....what exactly defines a "complex" website? Other browsers, such as Chrome and Safari, have been making similar claims recently and each is touting new JS engines.

Speaking of Safari, Apple proudly announced 2 weeks ago the release of Safari 4 had garnered 11 million downloads in its first 3 days. A hidden detail though (taken straight from the Microsoft book of statistics) was that much of these downloads occurred due to Apple force-feeding the update to customers through its updating utility. Mozilla put that number into perspective the following day, when they mentioned that the VERY minor update to Firefox (version 3.0.11) had been downloaded more than 150 million times in 24 hours. Moral of the story...Firefox is a major player in the browser world...Safari, not so much.

Even Mozilla's presence needs perspective, however. In the US, Firefox accounts for about 20 percent of the usage share, compared to 73 percent for IE. It's a respectable number, mind you, considering that IE is available virtually by default for the vast majority of people, but 20% is 20%. Internationally, however, those numbers are closer together and in some European countries (such as Finland, Poland, and Slovenia) Firefox actually leads IE and controls about 50% of the market.

Market share in Europe will get even closer with the release of Windows 7. Due to the EU's rather unreasonable antitrust battle with Microsoft, the software giant announced recently it would meet their demands and will not include IE8 with Windows 7 (after all...they aren't asking Apple to un-bundle Safari). Microsoft will instead include IE8 as an optional add-on (called "IE 8 Pack") that can be acquired via CD, FTP, or retail channels. This version of Windows will be known as "Windows 7 E". Again, to add a bit of perspective here, PC manufacturers will always bundle a browser of some kind with their machines, and true, some of them will include Firefox instead of IE. But, Microsoft has shifted their giant "marketing" machine (some might loosely translate "marketing" as "goon squad") toward PC makers instead and it can be expected that the majority of those manufacturers will still include the new IE 8 Pack...but just maybe not exclusively anymore.

For more information on the new Firefox browser, and the free download, head on over to the Mozilla Website.