It’s official: Firefox 3.5 has been released! Grab it from the Mozilla website before it becomes overloaded by eager Firefox aficionados!
Typically, I’d only just installed the latest beta. If that’s anything to go by, Firefox 3.5 is stable and significantly faster than before.
Be aware that many Firefox add-ons may not work yet. However, there is a workaround that forces your favorite extensions to work. Use it at your own risk…
- Open ‘about:config’.
- Right-click and add a new boolean value named ‘extensions.checkCompatibility’.
- Set that value to false.
- Restart the browser.
The release of Firefox 3.5 is a great topic for my hundredth SitePoint post. Hope you manage to grab the browser whilst it’s hot — let us know what you think of it.
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We are so excited!
Made a quick short, enjoy!
July 1st, 2009 at 2:10 am
Didn’t let me embed, oh well: here it is
July 1st, 2009 at 2:13 am
I’ll wait for another month until all the plugins are compatible. Not doing the same mistake again…
July 1st, 2009 at 2:54 am
@papaman
Yep – know what you mean. For me, using Fx without Tab Mix Plus feels like 1998 all over again. At least Firebug and the WDT are compatible though.
July 1st, 2009 at 3:08 am
No thanks “Be aware that many Firefox add-ons may not work yet. ” is why I never work with something as soon as it’s released.
There is the leading edge and bleeding edge.. Where do you want to be?
July 1st, 2009 at 4:25 am
Personally, I like to be at the bleeding edge! All my web dev plugins seem to be compatible with it so hey ho lets go!
July 1st, 2009 at 7:43 am
I’m feeling brave – gonna check it out. As long as Firebug works I can live without any others in the short-term.
July 1st, 2009 at 8:10 am
Google AdWords’ site does not work at all on Firefox 3.5, so there’s no way I can switch to that browser right now:
“Support for Firefox 3.5 is coming soon. Until then, please use an earlier version of Firefox when viewing the new interface.”
It’s unfortunate since Firefox 3.5 finally adds the feature I value most in Chrome and Opera: the ability to drag tabs between windows or into their own new window.
July 1st, 2009 at 9:02 am
There’s only a couple of extensions I use that haven’t been updated to FF3.5 (there’s a few where the extensions haven’t been added to the official add-ons site yet so you have to get them from the developers’ sites – if you do a search you’ll find versions that work for 3.5).
So far I’m loving it. 3.x had been getting really slow to the point of being almost unusable but I disabled some troublesome extensions, upgraded to 3.5 and it’s back to its best.
July 1st, 2009 at 1:29 pm
now i feel 3.5 speed is really at its best after uninstall Tab Mix Plus which is incompatible with 3.5 version. All others like xMark, Web Dev. Tool Bar and Flash Block work just great!!
July 1st, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Sitepoint is cheering the release of 3.5, but Codeburner is not compatible. Hmm.
July 2nd, 2009 at 12:23 am
Hey all, been using FF since the beginning of time.
Now i know everyone is raving wow FF 3.5 is great, let me tell you my experience with it and you may want to hold of until several bugs are addressed.
Today i have spent a good 4-5 hours backtracking to and from the FF support forums to report several problems and have noticed many others are seeing the same problems.
My issues: (note i have never had FF crash on me once in the past, or had any problems whatsoever.)
- Ebay.com my mouse cursor is disappearing behind the FF window and flickering
- Several websites are showing “Page not found”
- Updating my WP sites i had firefox crash several times
- CPU usage is about 20-30% higher than the previous 3.3 version
- Firefox runs sluggish when Photoshop is open (taxing my memory hard) 2 gig OCZ high end memory
Anyway just trying to save you guys a lot of trouble, i would suggest that you wait for the fixes to be released, or at the very least check the FF support forums first and see just how many people are having problems ranging from no sound to 100% cpu usage when firefox is running.
Hope that saves some of you from a headache.
Good luck
July 2nd, 2009 at 11:53 pm
I have to agree with callofduty.
I noticed that Firefox 3.5 is using more CPU power than Firefox 3.0.11 when loading the same pages and without any addons installed.
July 3rd, 2009 at 1:30 am
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.
July 14th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
I don’t mind not all add-ons are supported but the problem I have is everytime I use FF 3.5, I cannot open many tabs without ‘freeze’. It means whenever I open many tabs I will have to wait until the page(s) is/are loaded before I can navigate/click/do anything at all. I am not using FF 3.5 now, instead I use Safari until the problem is gone. :-(
July 15th, 2009 at 11:08 pm