Mozilla Firefox 3.5 released

Mozilla has officially released Firefox 3.5 today as predicted earlier this week.

Firefox 3.5 is the first major revision since 3.0 was released about a year ago. The new version sports a faster rendering engine, stability enhancements and a new javascript engine. It will also include support for the most widely-used elements of HTML 5 that allows for offline data access, enhanced web graphics and multimedia playback without plug-ins. The Firefox logo has also had a small revision as well.

Mozilla has been showing different 3.5 features within a 35 day period, and has also shown the new tools developers can take advantage of in the new version.

The new version was originally going to be 3.1, but was renamed to 3.5 later to reflect a greater scope of changes than what had originally been planned.

What's new in 3.5?

According to Mozilla's release notes:

• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey javascript engine.
• The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.
• 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: HTML5, 'video' and 'audio' elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, javascript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.