Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate Delayed, But Imminent

by Sam Dean - Jun. 08, 2009Comments (5)

Things are heating up in the browser wars, with open source leading the way. Google is out with alpha versions of its Chrome browser for the Mac and Linux, and while the Linux version needs some improvement, it is promising. The newest Windows version of Chrome is also much faster than previous versions. Meanwhile, Mozilla has pushed back its official release date for Release Candidate 1 of the Firefox 3.5 browser to June 10th. While I love the speed of Chrome and its ability to avoid crashing when a single tab crashes, I'm still betting that Firefox 3.5 will be the biggest browser story of the year.

As always, the ace-in-the-hole that Firefox has is the large ecosystem of useful extensions available for it. The way Mozilla has fostered an enthusiastic community of extension developers is a lesson for developers of all types of software applications, and there are now over 7,000 Firefox extensions. On top of that, Mozilla is pushing ahead with Jetpack, its new initiative to make Firefox extensions much more easy to develop.

Much has been made of the leapfrogging speed competition going on between Google Chrome and beta versions of Firefox 3.5, but the fact is the speed differences are incremental, and Chrome is a long way from being as flexible as Firefox is due to its extensions.

In all likelihood, Mozilla won't make its deadline of two days from now for the much anticipated Release Candidate of Firefox 3.5. The company has said it has 10 bugs to fix first. Still, the release is likely in the next few days--very much worth keeping on your radar.
 


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5 Comments
 

Come on, Chrome is clearly the biggest browser story, and if not Chrome, then WebKit. It absolutely dominates all mobile browsing worth using (Mobile Safari, Android, Palm WebOS) and with both Safari and Chrome winning the speed wars, I can only see it gaining more momentum. Firefox is a great platform, but its biggest strength, extensions and plugins, is also its biggest weakness. At this point, especially when users are either wanting to move to lower-powered machines or do mobile computing, the added overhead you get by having a bajillion extensions is no longer necessarily worth it.


0 Votes

Chrome sucks, Safari crashes to much and Opera is child's play. Firefox rules all browsers and the only reason why Internet Explorer is around is because of Microsoft market share on Operating Systems and it's large market share in the corporate world.


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For me, the biggest advantage (beside speed) of using Firefox over both, Chrom and IE, is that it has no "hidden agenda" behind it. IE and chrom were written to "encourage" users to use Google and MS products respectively. Firefox does not have such objective. It is truly neutral.


0 Votes

Firefox sucks ass, it's the worse browser ever. Opera is 10 times faster.


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Firefox 3.5 has been a total train wreck. It stalls, it locks up, it crashes, it does absolutely everything wrong. I absolutely completely hate it. After a fantastic experience on almost every Firefox release to date, this has been absolutely horrible. Faster? Not even close. It's slower at best, and pathetic at.... well, it's frankly pathetic. They have got to do better than this.


0 Votes
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