Just in time to close out the end of the 1st half of 2009, Firefox 3.5 was officially released yesterday by the Mozilla folks, amidst a surprisingly small amount of fanfare.
Is it because of the “.5″ portion of its version number? Or is it because many people who were previously enamored with Firefox 2 were significantly less thrilled with Firefox 3, particularly the frequent mysterious crashes? Whatever the case, a major new “feature” of this release is its improved speed in loading Web pages. While some of the rendering speed issues may historically be due to the client, there is also often some degradation of the user experience due to transmission rates and the server-side portion of the Web applications. As a result, under real world situations, many people may not notice a significant speed improvement in sites that they frequent.
There is also a new privacy feature that prevents the browser from storing information from or about a site you visit. Some of you will undoubtedly try the feature and then decide that maybe it would’ve been nice to be able to browse your cache for the now-missing content; others will find this feature quite useful under certain circumstances.
Additionally, there are other improvements to the app. It certainly warrants trying, if for nothing else than to replace Firefox 3. 
