For all you tech-heads out there, Firefox 3.5 was released today and it serves to have a few nifty features added to the venerable Mozilla toolbox. If you are a tech-head you probably already know about this and have installed it, but just in case you don't, I wanted to inform you so that you could run along and go install it.
The most noteworthy features that I can see in the initial run-through are horked straight from Google Chrome - "private browsing" (the "incognito window" in Chrome-speak) and location-aware browsing services. The private browsing is great for doing personal searches or other surfing on, say, a company laptop and it can also be good (or bad, if you're a parent) for keeping prying eyes out of your surfing habits by other family members. You can be sure that the surprise party you're planning won't be betrayed to your S.O. by your browser if you use the private browsing feature, however, so it's well worth playing around with.
I've not had too much time to play around with the location-aware features, and I'm not sure how useful they'll be on a static desktop from home, but again I can see how they'd be useful for laptop applications to save some strokes (and risk of worsening carpal tunnel syndrome) by not requiring the user to input their location. I'll have to get back to you on how useful I find this feature in day-to-day living.
Of course, there are several other enhancements - not the least of which is the underlying rendering engine (Gecko 1.9) - which makes things render ultra-fast and smooth. There's also some new video support and such, so hopefully we can start getting away from all the flash-enabled content and get something that might actually be able to display inline video in cell phone web browsers.
I will say this - I've tried to like Chrome and have tried to use it, but the incognito window and the direct link to Google were the linchpins in my attempts to stick with it. The lack of my favorite plugins or the integration thereof with the browser (as I have with Firefox) was a source of constant consternation for me and now that FF has gone and added those things which I found most useful about Chrome, I think that Chrome is going back into the dustbin until it's got something that nobody else has. The "each tab is a separate process" idea is really cool, but I'm finding that my browser just isn't crashing that much to warrant that kind of feature loyalty.
So, my dear Firefox, I'm back. It'll be like I never left. Hold me.
