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Firefox

Version: 3.5.6

Downloads Count: 240,381

License Type: Free

Price: Free

Date Added: Dec 18, 2009

Operating Systems: Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003

Requirements: Pentium 233MHz processor, 64MB RAM, 52MB free hard drive space

File Size: 7898 KB

Author: Mozilla

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Editorial Review of Firefox

Firefox 3.5 boasts a number of significant changes. They range from new ways to work with the browser features to under-the-hood improvements that developers say will make the browser over twice as fast as Firefox 3.

Like many new browsers, Firefox 3.5 adds a private browsing mode to its arsenal of features. While in private browsing mode, Firefox won't remember history, cookies, usernames, or passwords from your session. When you start private browsing, Firefox closes all of the pages that you currently have open, but it saves all of your open windows so you can get back to what you were doing before you switched to private browsing--a nice touch.

To provide further privacy, Firefox 3.5 can "forget" any particular site. If I find myself checking my eBay auctions while at my desk, I can open the History panel, right-click any ebay.com reference, and choose 'Forget This Site'. One important caveat: When you tell Firefox to forget a subdomain of a site, it won't forget other subdomains of that site. For example, if I tell Firefox to forget all history references for shop.ebay.com, it will cease to remember any Web address starting with 'shop.ebay.com', but not pages starting with 'cgi.ebay.com'.

Firefox 3.5 now permits sites to find your location by using your IP address and by gathering data about nearby Wi-Fi networks, via Google Location Services (if you have a WWAN card in your notebook, it will use cell-phone towers to find your location, just as Google Latitude does). This feature could be particularly useful for people who are visiting map sites or business user-review sites in search of nearby locations (though few sites support geolocation at present).

For the sake of your security and privacy, each site that wants to use your location must have your permission. Firefox sends your IP address, nearby Wi-Fi networks, and a unique random ID (which expires after two weeks) to the server in order to find your whereabouts.

In casual experiments with Mozilla's geolocation test page (which you can't use at all unless you're using Firefox 3.5), I used a Windows PC connected to our office's wired network and a Mac connected to the office's Wi-Fi network. The page found the Mac within a range of a couple of blocks, but it couldn't be any more specific for the Windows PC than the greater San Francisco Bay Area.

Tabs work better in Firefox 3.5 than in previous versions. Just as you could with Firefox 3.0, you can rearrange the tab order and drag-and-drop tabs off the toolbar onto another Firefox window (to move the tab to that window). In Firefox 3.5, you can also drag a tab onto your desktop to create a new window containing that tab.

Firefox 3.5 builds upon Firefox 3.0's session-restore feature by remembering what you've entered into Web forms before you close the window. For example, suppose that I have to close the browser midway through replying to a reader comment on pcworld.com; when I reopen Firefox and restore my previous browser session, everything that I typed into the text box will still be there. It's about time a browser did this. If you're typing something that you don't want someone else to see later, be sure to delete it before you close the window.

Among Firefox 3.5's other new features are improved performance (Firefox claims that 3.5 is eight times faster at JavaScript performance than Firefox 3.0), integrated support for Ogg Theora video, and support for the latest Web technologies.

Note: This link takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

--Nick Mediati

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