As a web developer and a great fan of Firefox, I’m eagerly waiting for Firefox 3.5 to get released. Prior to that, Mozilla has announced the release of Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate version on few days back. As the features that are present in the release candidates, will mostly like to be in the actual software also, we can hope that the Firefox’s RC version reflects the the features that will be loaded into FF 3.5. Below are some points on what I’m expecting Firefox’s next release.
Support for HTML5
Taking our plain-old HTML to the next level and to cope up with current web development needs, W3 organization is making many proposals for adding new features to HTML. Named as HTML5, the features includes Geo-Location support, Video and Audio tags, new Canvas element and some others. The web has already started murmuring that Video tag could be the flash-killer, siting it’s ability to include the video directly in the web page with out the need of Flash to do that. Even though Adobe’s CEO has responded positivley about HTML5 Video feature, we have to wait and see the impact.
Leaving what Video tag could do to Flash aside, the other interesting feature is the Geo-location support. As I’ve already talked about the FF’s support for Geo-location, the browser will provide the ability to retrieve the user’s (or more exacly the device where the browser is running on) current location to the web applications, thus enabling the applications to great the user bonjour if he’s from France or Namaste if he’s from India. Well, the Geo-location can do more than the hello world example that I just told. It will be interesting to see how the developers around the world can make use of this feature and bring up some cool location-aware applications.
Apart from those two things, FF 3.5 is expected to support much more HTML5 recommendations. So, get ready your web applications for HTML5. 
Will it tackle Chrome?
The release of Chrome browser has already set the web browser market on fire. Apart from the fact that Chrome is from Google, the usability and the speed has earned a good name to it. I myself, started using Chrome for some time, but later returned to FF (thank you, Firebug!). Well the thing is this: Chrome is coming, better watch FF!!
As the Chrome marketing team said, Chrome is the browser for current web 2.0 applications. In one way, it is correct. The web is no longer static web page (if you still think it’s static, come out of the cave please!). Web 2.0 application’s need more processing power on the client side. Chrome got this point correctly and introduced the threaded processing capability. So, each tab in Chrome will run in it’s own process. This increased the web application’s performance and even if one web application hangs, it doesn’t affect the other applications because they are now running in different processes.
So, what will Firefox’s answer to the current processing need of web 2.0 applications? I would say it is web workers. Part of the HTML5, Web Workers enable the browser to send some complex processing to a seperate thread exists mainly for such kinda processing (thus the name Web Worker). Well, Firefox 3.5 supports Web Workers, which will be good news to the developers of processing-thirst web 2.0 applications.
Finally, the only concern I’d with Firefox is the time it takes for loading. It will be good if Firefox 3.5 loads quickly and use lesse memory.
So, those are my expectations for Firefox 3.5. Feel free to comment your thoughts on Firefox 3.5 release. I’ll be happy to know your points.
{ 4 comments }
Hey Veerasundar. Glad you’re looking forward to Firefox 3.5. As you said, what’s in the RC is absolutely going to be in the release since the release candidate _will_ be the release if we don’t find any problems with it.
I’m curious about your slow start-up time. Firefox really should launch in just a couple seconds, even on several year old hardware. If you’re waiting longer than 4 or 5 seconds, I think there’s something corrupted in your Firefox profile and I’d recommend starting fresh with a new profile when you get Firefox 3.5.
There are good instructions about creating a new profile here: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing+profiles
Once you’ve created a new profile, Firefox should start up very quickly. Then you can start to add back your extensions one at a time, testing start-up time with each new extension. Hopefully you will find the extension that was causing slow start up and you can avoid that one or find an update or a replacement.
- A
Thanks for your prompt reply, Asa. I’ll definitely try out the ‘profile’ work around that you have suggested for speeding up Firefox load time.
I wish all the best for the Firefox 3.5 release! Waiting for it.
Firebug is over rated compared to the Safari/Chrome/Webkit web inspector. Right click and choose “inspect element”.
Hi Philip,
I’ve used the other web inspectors (Chrome, IE8). But, I feel more comfortable in using Firebug than any other web inspectors. It doesn’t mean that the other web inspectors are not good. A developer at the other end of the world may prefer Dragonfly than Firebug. It’s all just the personal preferences.
Thanks for your suggestion and Welcome to my blog.
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