Firefox 3.5 RC2 released

Posted at 11:39am on Monday June 22nd 2009

After a short break in the sun, we're happy to return to the land of Linux and see that Firefox 3.5 has now gone into its second release candidate. Codenamed Shiretoko, it now has many more new features compared to the 3.0.x releases, including: support for HTML 5, adding <audio> and <video> tags so you can now watch embedded Ogg Vorbis and Theora content, and a new, faster JavaScript engine called Tracemonkey, featuring faster code execution. More after the break...

The new W3C Geolocation API which allows your code to be "location aware".
A private browsing mode, dubbed by some as "porn mode" which does not save your browsing history or anything that could trace your activities when in use.
Downloadable fonts!
Over 70 languages supported
Improvements to the layout engine, Gecko, which now allows "parsing for faster content rendering".
HTML5 local storage, application storage, CSS media queries, and other new web technologies

Beware! This is not recommended for everyday users, and is only encouraged for testers! You can get it in the following ways: Download it from Mozilla Update from within Firefox (Help > Check for updates...) Add it via APT or your chosen package manager by installing the package "firefox-3.5" or similar. The final version of Firefox 3.5 should be available to download by the end of June. See the release announcement for more information.

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Your comments

Free but not legal

Deon Kok (not verified) - June 22, 2009 @ 12:54pm

My Linux box now support more media than my windows boxes. The legality is under question for most installations though. Hopefully Mozilla can lever more general use of open source formats for content intended to be free. Having been involved in training animation videos and local dance show dvd issues the codec and dvd format handling is irritating.

ubuntu

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - June 22, 2009 @ 5:48pm

Is there any repo that support beta of Firefox3.5?

@Deon Kok: You can get most

Muzer (not verified) - June 22, 2009 @ 6:42pm

@Deon Kok: You can get most of the codecs (if illegally) with sudo aptitude install {,x,k}ubuntu-restricted-extras (on a{,n} {,x,k}ubuntu machine), and then you just need libdvdcss (which you can get from mediabuntu)

@ubuntu

JWR (not verified) - June 23, 2009 @ 2:24pm

sudo apt-get install shiretoko, iirc

apt-get is firefox-3.5

DaVince (not verified) - June 25, 2009 @ 12:58pm

Nope, it's sudo apt-get install firefox-3.5, but you'll get b4pre, not RC2. At least, I got b4pre.

I love the things they're doing with that new, free and open media codec. I'm just hoping it'll be optimized soon, videos are really slow on a 2GHz AMD Athlon machine and I can't imagine how slow they'll be on my 900Mhz Eee PC.

Are you sure...

Dan Dart (not verified) - June 25, 2009 @ 1:40pm

@DaVince Are you sure it's not a HW acceleration issue? Do you have proprietary drivers set up?