Firefox 3.5 Can Still Learn From Its Competition

03.07.2009
While Mozilla lights a fire under competing browsers with support of emerging Web standards with , it can still improve its performance, reliability, and usability.

Firefox has the misleading status of second most popular browser. Two-thirds of all sites are still visited by some version of . It's no secret that Microsoft only wins because the majority of computer users run Windows and aren't quite savvy enough to make a conscious decision about which browser to use. In fact, when .

However, with somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of the browser market, Firefox has the distinction of being the most popular browser chosen by individuals who actually consciously think about what browser to use.

In recent months, the competition has stepped up its game. Apple's Safari has achieved notable speed gains, Google Chrome came out of nowhere to redefine the browser as clean, fast, and simple again, and IE8 has some impressive new features.

With version 3.5, Firefox has also stepped up. In some ways, it is redefining the Web with support for HTML5 which supports video without a plug-in, and with other new technologies like native JSON, Web worker threads, downloadable fonts, and CSS media queries. These technologies will improve Web-development and, therefore, the user experience.

Firefox 3.5 has caught up in some key areas. It improved its speed with its new Gecko 1.9.1 rendering engine and TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. It borrowed from the break-away tab feature, which lets you drag a tab from the main browser window into its own window. This feature is highly useful in multi-monitor setups where it's desirable to compare two pages side-by-side. Finally, Firefox 3.5 adds Private Browsing Mode (aka "porn mode"), which all other mainstream browsers already had.