The main reason for this is because, Fx3.7 consisted primarily of “Out of Process Plugins” which as most of you know has been implemented in Fx3.6.4. This has pushed developers to bypass the 3.7 release and focus on pushing out Firefox 4.0, hopefully by November.

A couple of things that jump out to me are that there will be no more modal dialogs and software updates will switch to background tasks. This is to help improve the user experience as they are two of the main pause points in a using Firefox.

The background process updates I can understand, Chrome has shown that this is by far the best way to push out updates and bug fixes to users and ensure that everybody is running the same version across the board. The removal of modal dialog however Im not too sure about.

There are also the expected updates, the new chrome (browser layout, not Google browser) redesign, which has removed many of the less used parts of the interface as found during a Test Pilot back in March and from developer feedback.

Firefox 4.0 UI concept - May 2010

Something Im really excited about are the developer tools. In particular the console. Beltzner described it as a Quake style console, pulled from the top of the browser, as an advanced view source. With the ability to edit css/dom elements, and make other tweaks on the fly. They will continue to support Firebug and will also add a couple of other api’s to allow us to access rendering times and memory usage from within our apps with should help a lot with development and optimisation.

If you using Firefox or a modern web browser that supports fully open HTML video, you can watch Mike Beltzner presentation.
It is almost an hour long but I do recommend watching or at least listening, to what Mozilla believe is the future of Firefox and the direction they are going.

For more on this story, head over to Mike Beltzner blog post, view the slides and watch the presentation.

For a while there has been an option in the config to display image place-holders while a page loads but not for broken images as on IE (yes I’m praising an IE feature!).

Image placeholders on load is set to ON by default, your can change this if you want by going to about:config and searching for ‘image’. The option your looking for is:

browser.display.show_image_placeholders

Just double click to change the value.

As I said before, this doesn’t affect broken images after the page has loaded, and after several searches it looks like the option just isn’t available to Fx users as a general setting. There is however a solution…

Firefox allows users to specify custom CSS to be applied to websites on a global basis, e.g if you want your default link colour on unvisited links to be black instead of the default blue.

You do this by making changes to your global content css file. You can find it at the following location (OS Specific – I’m on windows 7) ‘%appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\\chrome’ (if your on a domain you will need to edit it in your roaming folder), look for a file called ‘UserContent-example.css’ and rename it to ‘UserContent.css’, this will then be loaded by Firefox when it fires up.

Add the following CSS to the file and restart Firefox..
/* Enable image placeholders */
@-moz-document url-prefix(http), url-prefix(file) {
img:-moz-broken{
-moz-force-broken-image-icon:1;
width:24px;
height:24px;
}
}

Thats it… when you next come accross a broken/missing image, you will get a box the size you have defined in its place with the alt inside it.

You can read more on the history of Mozilla Firefox on this wikipedia article.

Users of Twitter can show their support by adding a Twibbon to your Twitter profile picture

And everyone else can forward this link to friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances and anyone else you meet on the street – http://getfirefox.com/ and help to make the web a better place

This latest build see’s imp0rovment over the supported screen resolutions which means on my TYTN II, I can finally use Fennec in portrait mode and also view the options screen So far development on the Windows Mobile build have only been officially supported on the HTC Touch Pro, this latest build now supports the resolution of pretty much all the Windows Mobile based phones of the last couple of years.

The biggest update in this release is noted as being the start-up time. Although to be honest I haven’t noticed any difference myself, there had also been the addition of tile caching, similar to Google Maps, in order to speedup the rendering of pages and cut down on the work Fennec must do, you can read more about the tile caching on Roy Frostig blog

The only downside I could find with this latest release is that the ability to zoom appears to have disappeared, double-clicking on the screen makes it flicker but nothing happens.

If you want to read more on this latest release, see the offical blog post, the release notes and better yet, download the cab installer.

Anyone riding the BETA channel can do a manual update to download ff3.5.3 otherwise you can download from here – http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/3.5.3-candidates/build1/

You can download Namoroka using the following links

• Windows: Namoroka 3.6 Alpha 1 Setup.exe
• Mac OS X: Namoroka 3.6 Alpha 1.dmg
• Linux: namoroka-3.6a1.tar.bz2

Mozilla have, as always, released a developer guide to the new features, for a full list of additions to Firefox 3.6 follow this link

Developers should head on over to the developer notes if you’ve not read them already, there is also a blog that Mozilla have setup that explains the new features in more details, its called hacks.mozilla.org i would advise everyone has a quick look over it as there is a lot of useful stuff on there.

Want to know more?

Mozilla’s 3.5 announcement post can be found here

You can download Firefox 3.5 here

Or watch the tour below…

A lot of people dont know about these so thought I would also add a link to the Firefox Tips and Tricks

I’ll add some notes about how it runs in a day or two,
In the meantime you can read the mozilla blog post here or download the updated releases for windows mobile or maemo, as with previous releases there are also builds for your desktop pc (windows, linux and mac) available on either of the download pages

This update is not being made available via direct download and only via auto-update through the Beta channel. If you are currently running a Beta build, select “Check for Updates…” in the “Help” menu.

As always developers should read the Firefox 3.5 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center to keep up to date on latest bug fixes and known problems.

Update – 17/06/09 @ 19:32

Mozilla released an email to the beta mailing list last night to clarify the roll out process, for those of you that aren’t on the mailing list, here it is.

There was a bit of miscommunication yesterday regarding the testing of the Release Candidate. The release team decided to follow a different path this time, which is explained in this post by Mike Beltzner:
http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.planning/browse_thread/thread/ce690ef030e2b98b?pli=1

So while some of you may have seen the early release candidate version on the all beta page briefly yesterday, it was taken down. This early release candidate build is *not* being released on the beta download page; if someone out there wants to get at it, they should first become a beta tester by downloading a beta and then they will receive the updates. You can do that by visiting: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html, downloading the Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 and then performing a manual software update (Help -> Check for Updates).

So here is the updated scheduled:

• June 16th: Firefox 3.5 beta users get updated to an early release candidate version
• June 19th: target public ship date for Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 1
• end of June: target ship date for Firefox 3.5

Thanks for your patience and we hope you can join us in testing this exciting release.

marcia

Update – 20/06/09 @ 10:32

The release candidate has now been released to the general public, you can download FF3.5rc2 here

Update – 26/06/09 @ 11:06
Mozilla have now pushed out an updated release candidate for us to test, download FF3.5rc3 here

Opera Mobile 9.7

Last week saw the release of an Opera 10 beta, this week Opera have released a beta of mobile 9.7 (available for win mobile 6.1 only at the minute, a blackberry and android versions are in the works).
What surprised me a little was that we were in the middle of a beta for version 9.5, which has now disappeared with no update off Opera to the beta mailing list. The 9.5 beta hadn’t been updated since early February so it does make a little sense that the updates to the mobile version of Opera would result in a jump in version numbers. I download the update yesterday and i have to agree with Opera, the browsing speed has greatly improved even with their new turbo browsing feature turned off. Apart from the browsing speed I couldn’t tell much difference between 9.5 and 9.7 and the feature list is pretty much identical. One interesting addition in 9.7 is the inclusion of dragonfly (operas answer to firebug) Bug fixing via mobile hasn’t really been on my development check list, more of an after thought, but as more and more people use their mobiles for browsing I think Opera have pulled one out of the bag by including dragonfly with the browser.

Firefox 3.5:developer

Mozilla yesterday released a developer version (post-beta but pre-rc) of Firefox 3.5 to enable us to do some final testing before they push out the release candidate of 3.5.  As mentioned several time in the past, 3.5 brings a whole host of new features: html 5 entities, improved css, and not forgetting the almost mythical @font-face rule. All developers should digest the feature list soon as possible. The RC is expected to be released within the next week or two and a push to general release couple of weeks later. Download the latest release from the beta channel.

Safari 4

Apple also stuck their finger in the browser release pie by announcing an end of the Safari 4 beta at their Worldwide Developers Conference. Safari 4 also includes more  support for html5 and css3 entities and its own version of PORN private browsing mode.  You can download Safari 4 direct from the safari homepage or read more about “whats in” safari on the new features page, although not much it seems…

Google Chrome

It wouldnt be fair to not  mention  an update for Google Chrome while Im talking about browser updates. While their hasnt been all that much pumping out of the developer channel for chrome recently there has been some good news for linux and mac fans. Early developer builds of chrome are now available for both platforms but developers have urged your to NOT download them, unless of course you enjoy potential crashes and an incomplete browser. Might be worth a dabble tho…