I upgraded my iMac and my Windows 7 machines to Firefox 3.5 (available here) today.
All went well. The total download/install time was about 4 minutes on my iMac – 2 minutes on Windows 7 RC.
This isn’t a particularly important release for me. I was happy with Firefox 3.0.1. But they promised more speed so I gave it a whirl.
- Snappier: With its new JavaScript engine – TraceMonkey, it does appear to be snappier, but not a whole lot more snappier as some had suggested.
- New Tab Icon: I like the new tab ‘+’ icon. They are imitated an IE feature here. This is useful, especially for news.
- Moving Tabs Between Windows: Now you can drag a tab out of the browser and a new window will open with that page. Or drag a tab from one window to another. For multi-monitor users like myself, this is a terrific new feature.
- Addons – Extensions: All my extensions except 1 migrated nicely. I needed to do a manual update to my Tab Extensions 1 extension (discussed here and available here) but that was to be expected.
- Open in Tabs’ Overwrite Bug: This ‘bug’ still persists in Firefox 3.5 (discussed here ). Alas, as long as the Tab Extensions add-on is available, this is not a problem for me.
See also:
- Firefox 3.5: The Technologizer Review (Harry McCracken)
- Top 5 Killer Features in Firefox 3.5 (Mashable) Me: a bit of hyperbole in the title!
- First Look: Firefox 3.5 released, ready to “upgrade” the Web (ars technica)
I've been using the betas since last October or November. There's much less memory use and slowdown when running multiple tabs which is a bigge for me, as I usually have over a dozen open. The browser is the OS. 😉
I’ve been using the betas since last October or November. There’s much less memory use and slowdown when running multiple tabs which is a bigge for me, as I usually have over a dozen open. The browser is the OS. 😉
I usually have a couple dozen tabs open across 2 or 3 or 4 open Firefox Windows at any given time but I haven’t noticed slowdowns since version 2. something. I have Windows 64 with 4 Gigs of RAM so maybe that has made a difference for me. Otherwise I’m not finding the tab memory use any better in 3.5 than 3.