Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Released!
The web most popular browser had just release their latest version, a big leap from their old version from 3.0.11 to 3.5. But as always, before you did an upgrade, few things to be aware of. Does your add-ons or plugins support for the latest version? Always check on the author’s site for any new updates, but this can be so inconvenient if you have tones of add-ons installed.
Luckily for Firefox 3.5, during the upgrade process it does check for add-ons compatibility mode. It will let you know which add-on need to be upgrade or if there is no upgrades at the moment, the installation will inform you about it and disable it after install. But still the disable add-ons is kept in your browser, every once a while it will check for any updates.
As for my case, 2 add-ons failed the compatibility check. There are Alexa Sparky and Google Gears. It’s quite a big impact to me that alexa sparky does not work. But I believe it will soon be updated. Base on Mozilla’s report, the Add-ons for Firefox 3.5 report show that of 804 add-ons, 87% are currently considered compatible with it. But if you depend a lot on the add-ons, you might wish to wait a little longer before upgrading.
So what features does the new Firefox 3.5 offers? Well, I will not go into details each and every feature but will highlight a few that catches my eyes. After the upgrade completes, you will be brought to the congratulation page. In the page, they show you a new feature call “open video”. Firefox 3.5 support the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements now. Which is cool that you can embed videos and audios directly, but I not sure what kind of video format you need to encode it.
I try to do some research on The Open Video Project, but somehow it got directed to UNC School of Information and Library Science. huh 
Anyway, you can try out the open video feature here.
Internet Explorer 8 InPrivate mode or Google Chrome Incognito mode both allow users to browse the web anonymously. This is good if you are browsing from public computers, the pages you visit won’t appear in your browser history or search history, and they won’t leave other traces like cookies on the computer. Well it is Firefox too have implemented it on their latest version. You can go to Tools -> Start Private Browsing or by pressing the hotkey Ctrl+Shift+P to start it. If you have few tabs open in the normal mode, Firefox will save your session and then close it to start private browsing mode.
After you close your private browsing (you will need to launch Firefox again) or stop the private browsing mode, all your previous saved tabs will reappear again.
Another cool thing is now you can drag a tab down and drop it, Firefox will open up a new browser with the page. This is good as from time to time, your tabs may grow and become scrollable from left to right. No one likes to scroll horizontally, not even your mouse. This is a great way to spread your pages into 1 Windows, and from there on you have more tabs to open.
After a tab is being drag out to form it’s own Windows, you can move it back to other Firefox Windows. Joining back the tabs as shown in the picture.
But be caution as the more tabs and more Firefox windows you open, it will take up more resources.
Well, these are a few features that I came into and quite happily for it. But after a few tries on the open video feature, somehow my system got hang until the form of no recover and I have to restart my PC. Then again it works the second time I tried to play some videos. Well, in my opinion, I still think you should wait a little longer before upgrading to the latest Firefox 3.5 version. Technologies are so advance now it wouldn’t take long before it become a more stable version.
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