S8080 Blog

The latest, greatest version of Firefox was released on the 30th June and so far, so good. Touted as the fastest (benchmarked twice as fast as V3), safest and smartest version yet. So what can you expect from the new version?

What’s New in Firefox 3.5

Firefox 3.5  is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use. Some of the notable features are:

• Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)
• Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

Developers can find out about all the changes and new features at the Mozilla Developer Center.

Reviews

The first tranche of reviews seem favourable – noting how solid and fast the release is. Here is a mini review from the Register and another from PC Advisor.

Aardvark is a small tool that allows you to easily manipulate the contents of a web page.

It’s available as a Firefox extension and as a bookmarklet that works in any browser. Through a simple set of keyboard shortcuts (press h to see them), you can manipulate any item on a web page – the most useful functionality being to remove elements, or to isolate them.

How is this useful? It can be invaluable when printing content from the web.

Invariably, the information you want to print is surrounded by ‘computer administrative debris‘, to use a phrase coined by Edward Tufte. Menus, comments, headers, footers, the list goes on – all of this is useful when you’re navigating through a website, but it’s mostly redundant when you’re reading it on paper. Some sites provide print stylesheets that optimize the page for printing, but many don’t – and that’s where Aardvark comes in handy. You can just highlight the section of the page that you’re interested in, isolate it (therefore removing all other elements from the page), and you’ve got a very printable and readable page.

It’s a bit tricky to describe in text, so the best thing to do is give it a spin yourself!

Firefox extension: http://karmatics.com/aardvark/
Bookmarklet: http://karmatics.com/aardvark/bookmarklet.html