Firefox 3.5 Focuses On Privacy

A few days ago, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate, and the world’s second most popular web browser is sporting some nifty new features.  Firstly, Firefox 3.5 contains addition speed improvements from the previous releases.  Mozilla claims that Firefox 2 averaged page load times of about 18,000 milliseconds, Firefox 3 at roughly 4,000 milliseconds, and Firefox 3.5 clocking in at 1,500 milliseconds.  That’s just enough of a difference to really notice the improvement!

The most noticeable changes lie in the browser’s privacy tools.  Firefox 3.5 has a new “Private Browsing” mode that will record absolutely nothing of your browsing habits.  Cookies, history, cache, etc is all deleted once you leave private browsing.

Firefox 3.5 also has a feature known as “Forget About This Site.”  This feature lets you select a site in your browsing history and remove all traces from your history.  You can also delete recent history in one, two, four hour increments, or everything from today.  As with previous versions, you will still be able to delete all browsing history as well.

In addition to the privacy features, the new version of Firefox will let you recover lost tabs if you accidentally closed the browser.  Under the history menu, there is a new feature that lets you restore any of the windows that have been closed recently.

Firefox 3.5 also has improvements that you will notice on the web.  Some features include:

• The ability to save video the same way you do images
• Dynamic videos which interact with other portions of the web page
• Location-aware browsing lets you send your location to websites to get content more relevant to you
• Downloadable fonts
• CSS improvements

Have you tried the release candidate?  Tell us what you think!