As you have certainly heard the Mozilla foundation released a brand new version of Firefox this week. So should you upgrade to Firefox 3.5 right away? let's have a look at the advantages and disadvantages of upgrading.
You should upgrade to Firefox 3.5 because...
- There is a new "porn mode", sorry, "stealth mode" that will let you surf without leaving any traces on your computer. This feature was first introduced by Google Chrome and it is nice to see it implemented in Firefox too. This is not a game changer for me however.
- It is faster! Following benchmarks done by the Mozilla foundation the Javascript engine of Firefox 3.5 is twice as fast as the one of 3.0. For those of you not in web development the Javascript engine is what executes most web applications like Gmail, Google docs etc... in your browser. Pages like Schmedley uses it a lot of it and actually require a recent browser with a fast Javascript engine to run acceptably. Note that the engine of Google chrome is even faster.
- It uses less memory! Although most of the progresses on memory usage were made when Firefox 3.0 was released the new version continues this trend. Benchmarks realized by Unixmen show that Firefox 3.5 is the browser that uses the less memory. This is a high advantage of Firefox 3.5 for those on older computers that have 512 Mb of memory or less.
- Is supports video and audio without the help of a plug-in. Currently most online videos require you to install the flash plug-in to be viewed. Firefox 3.5 is the first browser to natively support online video without the help of a flash plug-in, something that can be important for netbook user. The problem is that it only works for online video that is encoded in the Ogg Theora format. Currently Dailymotion is the only major video sharing site that supports this format, but it could prove useful in the future if more sites start to support the format.
You should NOT upgrade to Firefox 3.5 because...
- Not all extensions support the new version of the browser yet. If you use a lot of Firefox extensions it is very probable that at least some of them will not yet be compatible with the new browser. Firefox will warn you if some of your extension are not supported and will download updates if required, but if you require some extensions that are not actively updated you should probably wait a bit before jumping in bed with Firefox 3.5
Conclusion
Unless you depend on a lot of extensions I suggest that you upgrade to Firefox 3.5 as soon as possible. The new version is stable and is faster than Firefox 3.0. Add to that a few interesting new features like stealth mode and the advantages of upgrading quickly outweigth the inconveniences.
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2 Responses to "Should you upgrade to Firefox 3.5 ?":
I have upgraded to the latest version of Firefox. However as mentioned not all add-ons are compatible with the latest version. Some of them that do work are Adblock plus, Personas, Billeo , Cooliris, Twitterfox and Anycolour.
"There is a new "porn mode", sorry, "stealth mode" that will let you surf without leaving any traces on your computer. This feature was first introduced by Google Chrome"
Wanted to correct you and give credit to Apple for this one. Safari was the first to have this feature by default.
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