Firefox 3.5 includes the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which is said to be more than twice as fast as in v3.0 and ten times faster than Firefox 2, together with native integration of Ogg Theora video, and Location Aware Browsing.

There’s also some new privacy controls, including a “private browsing” mode that keeps no history, as well as a “Forget this Site” feature that clears all the temporary files, passwords, stored logins from a particular domain. The browser market has been heating up lately, with Microsoft releasing Internet Explorer 8, Google’s Chrome getting several updates and Apple debuting a new version of Safari at WWDC 2009 etc.

Anytime I am looking to buy some new hardware for my computer it seems like I spend hours comparing prices to find the best deal. Sometimes I get sick of looking and just buy without doing all the comparisons I know I could do and then I end up thinking in the back of my head I could have got it cheaper.

I ran across a new add-on for Firefox called Dynamite Data that is cool and will help find the lowest prices for any product you are shopping for. Once the add-on is installed all you need to do is go to a product page on any website and the add-on will show you how much the product costs from other websites.

Mozilla CEO, John Lilly has hinted in an Interview that we may be seeing Firefox Mobile in a few weeks time. If the reports are true, we may see an alpha version of Firefox Mobile very soon. An excerpt from the interview:

“We want to make sure that the Web on mobile is more like the Web than what the mobile industry offers today, which is closed, separate networks and not a very good information-getting experience for the user. The first thing is to bring Firefox to mobile devices. We’re working on that, and we’ll see some alphas in a few weeks.”

Mozilla has announced that they have set a new world record with over 8 million downloads of the Firefox 3 browser from Tuesday to Wednesday of this week, and they are just waiting for the Guinness folks to come around and verify the numbers. While we do like Firefox here at the ‘Brick and use it as our default browser, we did have a few questions about this record attempt in general.

For starters, there was really no Guinness record for the most number of downloads to begin with, so beating a record that was not there was a shoe-in for the company. Also, if someone wants to shoot it down it just might not be all that hard since Adobe says that 8 million Flash Player installs is just an average day. YouTube servers out over 100 million videos each day and what is the torrent download count at, like over 5 billion?

Mozilla has decided to get down to business about developing a mobile browser and have recently hired two developers experienced in mobile Linux-based applications to start building a mobile version of the Firefox browser. The company didn’t give any dates on when they thought the new browser would be available and it might be a little early to know what types of phones it would be able to run on, but they did let us know it wouldn’t be this year.

We would love to see something in the way of mobile from Firefox soon and hopefully sometime next year. The longer Mozilla takes the stiffer the competition will become and already the company will have challenges getting into mobile devices with Microsoft and Apple. Both of these companies run their own browser on their respective platforms which integrate nicely, but that certainly hasn’t stopped Firefox from swaying a chunk of users already with desktop browsers. Here at the ‘Brick we currently see over 38% of our readers using a Firefox browser and that percentage continues to rise. Opera Software will be another tough competitor having had a mobile browser in the market for a number of years already, but Mozilla feels there is till room for another and possibly better option.

According to the Spread Firefox blog over 400 million downloads of the Firefox web browser have occurred since it’s launch just 3 years ago in November of 2004. The post spelled out a little history of the spread of Firefox, citing 25 million downloads in the first 99 days of the browser being available. Within a year they had over 100 million and another 100 million the year after that.

This 400 million downloads doesn’t necessarily mean that there are 400 million installations of the browser running out there, but it is nevertheless impressive considering Microsoft pretty much had a monopoly on the browser market just a few years ago with Internet Explorer. In fact the last 30 days here on the ‘Brick show that 42% of our readers are using Firefox which is up from 35% about a year …

The hardworking writers and editors at SlipperyBrick are definite Firefox fans. However, even we will admit that our favorite web browser could use some tweaks. We were pleased to hear about the new lineup of Firefox features for version 3. We distilled the requirements document from the developer meeting held this week and came up with the most interesting and promising features.

Mandatory

Improve the Add-On user Experience

Simplify Add-on Installation

Ability to install Ad-on in 3 or fewer mouse clicks (nice!)

Add-on configuration from the main Firefox application

Make updates availability more visible

Possibly install Add-ons without a restart (This would be awesome!)

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