Firefox 3.5 - First Thoughts
2009-07-01 14:09 by Craig Atkins
Firefox 3.5, the latest version of the award winning web browser from Mozilla was released yesterday.
We've downloaded, fiddled and played around with it on your behalf and have compiled our initial thoughts below.
Downloading it
The new version of Firefox can be downloaded from:
http://www.getfirefox.com
Yesterday, due to the massive influx of people downloading the new version the website was often slow or offline. Today, things seem much better. The download itself is approx. 7.5Mb in size, so if your on broadband then you should be able to download it in under 5 minutes.
Installation
We were running Firefox 3 on our test machine, and were interested to see how smooth the update process would be. We did not
uninstall the previous version of Firefox before installing 3.5.
We double clicked the setup icon and the installer extracts itself and begins the set-up. You are asked a few questions about where you want to install the program to (if you're upgrading, leave the installation location at it's default setting - it knows where it wants to go!)
Once you hit the final install button, the progress bar starts to tick along and Firefox 3.5 is installed. Quickly. Very quickly!
The entire process from double clicking on the installer icon to the 'install complete' screen was complete in just under 30 seconds!
Impressive stuff so far.
First Run
Upon the first run, Firefox 3.5 will check your extensions (these are add-ons which enhance or update Firefox, like toolbars). This extension check will flag up any extensions that are incompatible with the new version. Here was our incompatible extension list:
Pressing 'Check Now' will do an online check for any extension updates that can be downloaded and applied, which will then allow the incompatible add-ons to run. We pressed 'Check Now' and got:
So, not all of our add-ons are ready for Firefox 3.5 yet. This is no big surprise as the release version is brand new - We would expect that compatibility will be restored for the other extensions in due course. However, we did hit our first minor issue here - the eBay companion add-on is shown to be compatible after an update, but then came up with an error saying it's not compatible with Firefox 3.5 - not a big issue, but a little strange after it's pushed as a compatible update.
If you are a new user, you won't see the screens above but will be presented with an option to import settings, favourites, etc. from Internet Explorer.
Once these initial steps are completed, we move on to actually trying out the new Firefox 3.5 experience.
Using the browser:
One of our complaints about Firefox 3 was that it took quite a while to get loaded up. Not quite as long as Internet Explorer, but it was achingly slower than Google Chrome. Unfortunately, for us, Firefox 3.5 still isn't quite up to speed in this department. Granted, it loads quicker than it's predecessor but not by a noticeably large amount.
It does, however, stack up better in the memory usage department. Firefox 3 and previous versions have had huge issues with consuming memory. Even loading up the trivial 'welcome screen' home page would cause Firefox to eat bucket loads of system memory. The result of this was that systems running with low memory would slow up considerably and it was an arduous task to have a lot of Firefox tabs or windows open at the same time.
To compare, here is a task manger view of the memory usage of Firefox 3, just before upgrade, with 3 tabs open:
Screenshot of Firefox 3 - using almost 300Mb of real + virtual memory
And then, the new Firefox 3.5:
The new Firefox 3.5 using around 38% less memory
Mozilla have openly touted the new memory management of Firefox 3.5, and have plugged over 70 memory leaks (issues that cause increased memory usage over time) in the new Firefox.
Looking at our machine as we write this, Firefox 3.5 has been running for 6 hours and is using 440MB of RAM (240MB of physical memory) - but we have 2 windows open, with 18 tabs between them, so this doesn't seem too excessive.
Speed
Another much touted feature is an improved JavaScript engine, which is much quicker at processing scripts than the previous engine in Firefox 3. What this means to those of you without a degree in Geek Speak is that dynamic websites should load up quicker, and common tasks on web pages should work quicker too.
As an initial test, we opened up our company Google Calendar which has our bookings stored in it. It usually takes a couple of seconds to display fully on Firefox 3. Amazingly, it displayed almost instantly!
Thinking this may have been a fluke, we tried out a couple of other web applications like Google Mail, Facebook and Flickr. They all loaded, or seemed to load, a lot quicker than before.
The performance of the new browser seems to be in the same realms as Google Chrome, which is impressive considering the extra features is has over and above the Google competitor.
Other goodies
So, what other goodies are there, and why should you upgrade?
Well, apart from the increased speed and better memory usage, Firefox 3.5 adds some extra new features that will enhance the delivery of content from websites. These technologies include Geo-Location and some nifty inbuilt streaming video support.
However, the number of websites that are supporting these technologies at the moment is pretty small - the Geo-Location will arguably become more widely supported than the video streaming (as Flash, the technology behind YouTube, Google Video and other video sharing services has cornered the market at the moment).
There is also a private browsing feature, allowing you to click a menu option and have your browsing 'forgotten' - this means any sites you visit while in private mode will not appear in your history, or leave any trace on your computer.
Bad points, or bugs
As with any new release, there will be things that people don't like and also some bugs. So far, we've not seen any show stopping bugs but there are some things we don't like much:
Private Browsing:
Great idea, but Google Chrome does it better. In Firefox 3.5 you press the 'Private Browsing' option and Firefox closes all your tabs (but remembers them) and then lets you browse in a clean window. When you finish, you deselect private browsing and it re-loads all of your tabs again.
We prefer the Google Chrome approach, which is to load up a new window when you press 'Private Browsing' - keeping your existing tabs/websites on screen. Then, you just close the private browsing window when you've finished. Simple!
Geo-location:
We tried the test example, on the Mozilla site, and it didn't work! Perhaps this is just due to the sheer number of people trying this out, but here is what we got:
Conclusion
Firefox 3.5 seems to be a real improvement on Firefox 3 - and we've not found any of our normal websites that don't work OK, so for normal users it should be stable enough to download and use now.
If you currently have Firefox or Internet Explorer then you should definitely download this new Firefox. If you've got Google Chrome and you're happy with the speed of it (and don't mind the lack of add-ons) then you should probably stay put!
Download the latest Firefox version for your computer from here:
http://www.getfirefox.com
We've downloaded, fiddled and played around with it on your behalf and have compiled our initial thoughts below.
Downloading it
The new version of Firefox can be downloaded from:
http://www.getfirefox.com
Yesterday, due to the massive influx of people downloading the new version the website was often slow or offline. Today, things seem much better. The download itself is approx. 7.5Mb in size, so if your on broadband then you should be able to download it in under 5 minutes.
Installation
We were running Firefox 3 on our test machine, and were interested to see how smooth the update process would be. We did not
uninstall the previous version of Firefox before installing 3.5. We double clicked the setup icon and the installer extracts itself and begins the set-up. You are asked a few questions about where you want to install the program to (if you're upgrading, leave the installation location at it's default setting - it knows where it wants to go!)
Once you hit the final install button, the progress bar starts to tick along and Firefox 3.5 is installed. Quickly. Very quickly!
The entire process from double clicking on the installer icon to the 'install complete' screen was complete in just under 30 seconds!
Impressive stuff so far.
First Run
Upon the first run, Firefox 3.5 will check your extensions (these are add-ons which enhance or update Firefox, like toolbars). This extension check will flag up any extensions that are incompatible with the new version. Here was our incompatible extension list:
Pressing 'Check Now' will do an online check for any extension updates that can be downloaded and applied, which will then allow the incompatible add-ons to run. We pressed 'Check Now' and got:
So, not all of our add-ons are ready for Firefox 3.5 yet. This is no big surprise as the release version is brand new - We would expect that compatibility will be restored for the other extensions in due course. However, we did hit our first minor issue here - the eBay companion add-on is shown to be compatible after an update, but then came up with an error saying it's not compatible with Firefox 3.5 - not a big issue, but a little strange after it's pushed as a compatible update.
If you are a new user, you won't see the screens above but will be presented with an option to import settings, favourites, etc. from Internet Explorer.
Once these initial steps are completed, we move on to actually trying out the new Firefox 3.5 experience.
Using the browser:
One of our complaints about Firefox 3 was that it took quite a while to get loaded up. Not quite as long as Internet Explorer, but it was achingly slower than Google Chrome. Unfortunately, for us, Firefox 3.5 still isn't quite up to speed in this department. Granted, it loads quicker than it's predecessor but not by a noticeably large amount.
It does, however, stack up better in the memory usage department. Firefox 3 and previous versions have had huge issues with consuming memory. Even loading up the trivial 'welcome screen' home page would cause Firefox to eat bucket loads of system memory. The result of this was that systems running with low memory would slow up considerably and it was an arduous task to have a lot of Firefox tabs or windows open at the same time.
To compare, here is a task manger view of the memory usage of Firefox 3, just before upgrade, with 3 tabs open:
Screenshot of Firefox 3 - using almost 300Mb of real + virtual memory
And then, the new Firefox 3.5:
The new Firefox 3.5 using around 38% less memory
Mozilla have openly touted the new memory management of Firefox 3.5, and have plugged over 70 memory leaks (issues that cause increased memory usage over time) in the new Firefox.
Looking at our machine as we write this, Firefox 3.5 has been running for 6 hours and is using 440MB of RAM (240MB of physical memory) - but we have 2 windows open, with 18 tabs between them, so this doesn't seem too excessive.
Speed
Another much touted feature is an improved JavaScript engine, which is much quicker at processing scripts than the previous engine in Firefox 3. What this means to those of you without a degree in Geek Speak is that dynamic websites should load up quicker, and common tasks on web pages should work quicker too.
As an initial test, we opened up our company Google Calendar which has our bookings stored in it. It usually takes a couple of seconds to display fully on Firefox 3. Amazingly, it displayed almost instantly!
Thinking this may have been a fluke, we tried out a couple of other web applications like Google Mail, Facebook and Flickr. They all loaded, or seemed to load, a lot quicker than before.
The performance of the new browser seems to be in the same realms as Google Chrome, which is impressive considering the extra features is has over and above the Google competitor.
Other goodies
So, what other goodies are there, and why should you upgrade?
Well, apart from the increased speed and better memory usage, Firefox 3.5 adds some extra new features that will enhance the delivery of content from websites. These technologies include Geo-Location and some nifty inbuilt streaming video support.
However, the number of websites that are supporting these technologies at the moment is pretty small - the Geo-Location will arguably become more widely supported than the video streaming (as Flash, the technology behind YouTube, Google Video and other video sharing services has cornered the market at the moment).
There is also a private browsing feature, allowing you to click a menu option and have your browsing 'forgotten' - this means any sites you visit while in private mode will not appear in your history, or leave any trace on your computer.
Bad points, or bugs
As with any new release, there will be things that people don't like and also some bugs. So far, we've not seen any show stopping bugs but there are some things we don't like much:
Private Browsing:
Great idea, but Google Chrome does it better. In Firefox 3.5 you press the 'Private Browsing' option and Firefox closes all your tabs (but remembers them) and then lets you browse in a clean window. When you finish, you deselect private browsing and it re-loads all of your tabs again.
We prefer the Google Chrome approach, which is to load up a new window when you press 'Private Browsing' - keeping your existing tabs/websites on screen. Then, you just close the private browsing window when you've finished. Simple!
Geo-location:
We tried the test example, on the Mozilla site, and it didn't work! Perhaps this is just due to the sheer number of people trying this out, but here is what we got:
Conclusion
Firefox 3.5 seems to be a real improvement on Firefox 3 - and we've not found any of our normal websites that don't work OK, so for normal users it should be stable enough to download and use now.
If you currently have Firefox or Internet Explorer then you should definitely download this new Firefox. If you've got Google Chrome and you're happy with the speed of it (and don't mind the lack of add-ons) then you should probably stay put!
Download the latest Firefox version for your computer from here:
http://www.getfirefox.com
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