After a long wait through betas and release candidates, Mozilla has announced the release of Firefox 3.5 earlier this morning.
For the release today, June 30, is around one year after the release of version 3.0 and six months after the originally planned release of a new version. It was formerly to be named as 3.1. But as more functionality and features grew, the .1 wasn’t enough for all the updates to be expressed.
The increase in scope represented by TraceMonkey and Private Browsing, plus the sheer volume of work that’s gone into everything from video and layout to places and the plugin service make it a larger increment than we believe is reasonable to label 3.1.
-Mozilla’s engineering vice president Mike Shaver
Major features in 3.5 include:
- TraceMonkey Javascript engine which Mozilla says is faster than SpiderMoney in 3.0
- Private browsing mode, to bring a common feature between Apple, Microsoft, and Google
- Browsing based on your location
- Support for HTML 5
You can grab the new version from their website here.
Just last week in an interview with Fox, Google CEO Eric Schmidt seemed to say he was not worried about Microsoft’s search engine Bing.
“It’s not the first entry for Microsoft. They do this about once a year,” Schmidt said. “I don’t think Bing’s arrival has changed what we’re doing. We are about search, we’re about making things enormously successful, by virtue of innovation.” However, he does belive there is a market for Bing and users have their own preferences. “google is about getting all the information and organizing it. Yahoo has a different strategy. We think ultimately Bing will evolve to a different strategy as well.”
A recent article by the New York Post headlined FEAR GRIPS GOOGLE tells us co-founder Sergey Brin is worried enough that he hired a team of top engineers to work on “urgent upgrades” to Google’s website and search algorithm. Inside sources say that Brin is leading the team himself to determine what makes Bing’s search algorithm different than that of Google’s.
I highly doubt Google would lose sleep over Bing as Microsoft’s jump in market share of two percent largely did not come from Google or Yahoo.
But if you like Bing AND Google, why not have the best of both worlds with Bingle?
