Firefox 3.5 available for download

By Stephen Shankland on 01 July 2009, 10:57am

Firefox 3.5, Mozilla's attempt to "upgrade the Web", is now available to download for Windows and Mac.

The browser has a range of new features, including a new JavaScript engine for faster Web applications such as Google Docs, the ability to show video built into Web pages without plug-ins, a private browsing mode, fancy downloadable fonts and geolocation technology that can let Web sites know where you are.

"So much is happening on the Web right now, it's a great time for browsers," said John Lilly, CEO of Firefox backer Mozilla, in a statement. "Firefox 3.5 brings together the most innovative Web technologies," he boasted, "and delivers them in the most complete and powerful modern browser."

With the software released, Mozilla programmers and their open-source comrades now can move on to the next round of updates, to encouraging Web developers to build in support for the new features, and to finalising new standards such as HTML 5.

Firefox broke Microsoft's lock on the browser market, but it now faces other challenges, chiefly Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome.

Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 in 70 different languages, taking advantage of the relatively broad internationalisation that's more feasible with open-source software.

Through revenue that comes from search ads, Google supplied Mozilla with $66m of its $75m revenue in 2007, the last year for which figures are publicly available.

Mozilla has a funky download tracker (pictured) where you can see how popular Firefox 3.5 is around the world. Currently the UK isn't doing terribly well at only 129,000 downloads, miles behind the US, Germany, Japan and France. We account for more than one of those here at Crave, and we'll be bringing you hands-on impressions later on today, including some very pretty graphs showing how fast it is.