The release of Firefox 3.5, the open source browser came as a formidable challenge to the Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8. In June, Firefox has a 22.5% market share according to web metrics company Net Applications, behind Internet Explorer's 65.5%. Though Internet Explorer's share has been declining for some time, the slide has accelerated over the last year since Firefox released version 3.0.
The new features of the Firefox 3.5 are:
Performance
Firefox 3.5 includes the TraceMonkey javascript engine, which gives the browser dramatically better performance than ever before. Firefox has always been fast, but this is the fastest Firefox ever (more than twice as fast as Firefox 3, and ten times as fast as Firefox 2), meaning Web applications like email, photo sites, online word processors and more will feel snappier and more responsive.
Firefox keeps your memory usage under control. The XPCOM cycle collector continuously cleans up unused memory. Plus, hundreds of memory leaks have been remedied.
Security & Privacy
The new web browser protects you from viruses, worms, Trojan horses and spyware. Also, it is designed to protect users' privacy online and provide greater control over their personal data. A new feature called as “Forget This Site,” which can remove every trace of a site from the user’s browser.
Further, it has private browsing, anti-phishing feature with parental controls. Firefox integrates elegantly with your antivirus software and has pop-up-blocker.
Customization
With over 6,000 Firefox add-ons, you can choose to download and install for a browser that works your way. Manage online auctions, upload digital photos, see the weather forecast in a glance and listen to music all from the convenience of your browser and add-ons Manager.
Beyond Add-ons, you can add new search engines, change toolbar preferences, display different sizes, shapes and styles for your browser’s navigation buttons and more.
Personal
New enhancements for Firefox 3.5 give you greater control over the ‘Awesome Bar’ and include privacy settings. You can label a site with names or categories that are meaningful to you. For example, you can label the site www.itvoir.com with the “news” tag as well as the “information technology” tag.
Productivity
Whether you use Windows Vista, Mac or Linux, the browser seamlessly integrates with your computer’s environment. An elegant new zoom feature lets you swoop in and see entire web pages.
Search
Search the web in record time with smart keywords. Searching the Web is a breeze with the search box inline, just to the right of your location bar. Search for a word or phrase on an open Web page. Highlight text before using the feature and finder opens pre-filled with your selection.
Universal Access
With a new graphics engine, Arabic, Persian, Punjabi and other script languages now render in a remarkably seamless way. Site designers and developers can create custom fonts that will be displayed and rendered properly even if you do not have the font installed on your computer.
Firefox speaks your language like no other browser on earth. It has over 70 different translations, from French and Chinese to Finnish and Czech.
The Cutting Edge
With offline browsing, you have information at your fingertips. Certain enabled sites may allow applications like your Web-based email to stay connected.
Firefox 3.5 automatically corrects color images that have the color profile data included. It is the first browser to support open video and audio formats, allowing practically limitless new ways for sites to display rich content.
Live Support
You can chat with knowledgeable Firefox community members who troubleshoot via company’s live chat site. A link at the top of your browser takes you to a support site with the answers you will need.
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Author: Amarpreet97
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Mozilla Firefox - faster, more secure, easier to use and sporting a new look, this latest Firefox release sets a new standard for web browser innovation. Mozilla Firefox project (formerly Firebird, which was formerly Phoenix) is a redesign of Mozilla's browser component, written using the XUL user interface language and designed to be cross-platform. It is small, fast and easy to use, and offers many advantages over other web browsers, such as the tabbed browsing and the ability to block pop-up windows.
Mozilla Firefox 3 is focused on improved memory handling, performance, and stability, improved XUL, and new core components such as application data stored in SQLite. Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 34 months. This new platform includes more than 15,000 changes to improve performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. Firefox 3 is been built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot more under the hood to offer website and Firefox add-on developers.
Secure:
* One-click site info: Click the site favicon in the location bar to see who owns the site and to check if your connection is protected from eavesdropping. Identity verification is prominently displayed and easier to understand. When a site uses Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, the site favicon button will turn green and show the name of the company you're connected to. (Try it here!)
* Malware Protection: malware protection warns users when they arrive at sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware. (Try it here!)
* New Web Forgery Protection page: the content of pages suspected as web forgeries is no longer shown. (Try it here!)
* New SSL error pages: clearer and stricter error pages are used when Firefox encounters an invalid SSL certificate. (Try it here!)
* Add-ons and Plugin version check: Firefox now automatically checks add-on and plugin versions and will disable older, insecure versions.
* Secure add-on updates: to improve add-on update security, add-ons that provide updates in an insecure manner will be disabled.
* Anti-virus integration: Firefox will inform anti-virus software when downloading executables.
* Vista Parental Controls: Firefox now respects the Vista system-wide parental control setting for disabling file downloads.
* Effective top-level domain (eTLD) service better restricts cookies and other restricted content to a single domain.
* Better protection against cross-site JSON data leaks.
Easy to Use:
* Easier password management: an information bar replaces the old password dialog so you can now save passwords after a successful login.
* Simplified add-on installation: the add-ons whitelist has been removed making it possible to install extensions from third-party sites in fewer clicks.
* New Download Manager: the revised download manager makes it much easier to locate downloaded files, and you can see and search on the name of the website where a file came from. Your active downloads and time remaining are always shown in the status bar as your files download.
* Resumable downloading: users can now resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting your network connection.
* Full page zoom: from the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images, or optionally only the text size. Your settings will be remembered whenever you return to the site.
* Podcasts and Videocasts can be associated with your media playback tools.
* Tab scrolling and quickmenu: tabs are easier to locate with the new tab scrolling and tab quickmenu.
* Save what you were doing: Firefox will prompt users to save tabs on exit.
* Optimized Open in Tabs behavior: opening a folder of bookmarks in tabs now appends the new tabs rather than overwriting.
* Location and Search bar size can now be customized with a simple resizer item.
* Text selection improvements: multiple text selections can be made with Ctrl/Cmd; double-click drag selects in "word-by-word" mode; triple-clicking selects a paragraph.
* Find toolbar: the Find toolbar now opens with the current selection.
* Plugin management: users can disable individual plugins in the Add-on Manager.
* Integration with Windows: Firefox now has improved Windows icons, and uses native user interface widgets in the browser and in web forms.
* Integration with the Mac: the new Firefox theme makes toolbars, icons, and other user interface elements look like a native OS X application. Firefox also uses OS X widgets and supports Growl for notifications of completed downloads and available updates. A combined back and forward control make it even easier to move between web pages.
* Integration with Linux: Firefox's default icons, buttons, and menu styles now use the native GTK theme.
Personal:
* Star button: quickly add bookmarks from the location bar with a single click; a second click lets you file and tag them.
* Tags: associate keywords with your bookmarks to sort them by topic.
* Smart Location Bar: type in all or part of the title, tag or address of a page to see a list of matches from your history and bookmarks; a new display makes it easier to scan through the matching results and find that page you're looking for. Results are returned according to their a combination of frequency, and recency of visits to that page, ensuring that you're seeing the most relevant matches. An adaptive learning algorithm further tunes the results to your patterns!
* Library: view, organize and search through your bookmarks, tags and browsing history using the new Library window. Create or restore full backups of this data whenever with a few clicks.
* Smart Bookmark Folders: quickly access your most visited bookmarks from the toolbar, or recently bookmarked and tagged pages from the bookmark menu. Create your own Smart Bookmark Folders by saving a search query in the Library.
* Web-based protocol handlers: web applications, such as your favorite webmail provider, can now be used instead of desktop applications for handling mailto: links from other sites. Similar support is available for other protocols (Web applications will have to first enable this by registering as handlers with Firefox).
* Download & Install Add-ons: the Add-ons Manager (Tools > Add-ons) can now be used to download and install a Firefox customization from the thousands of Add-ons available from our community add-ons website. When you first open the Add-ons Manager, a list of recommended Add-ons is shown.
* Easy to use Download Actions: a new Applications preferences pane provides a better UI for configuring handlers for various file types and protocol schemes.
Platform for Developers:
* New graphics and font handling: new graphics and text rendering architectures in Gecko 1.9 provides rendering improvements in CSS, SVG as well as improved display of fonts with ligatures and complex scripts.
* Color management: (set gfx.color_management.enabled on in about:config and restart the browser to enable.) Firefox can now adjust images with embedded color profiles.
* Offline support: enables web applications to provide offline functionality (website authors must add support for offline browsing to their site for this feature to be available to users).
* A more complete overview of Firefox 3 for developers is available for website and add-on developers.
Performance:
* Speed: improvements to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimizations have resulted in continued improvements in performance. Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3, and the popular SunSpider test from Apple shows improvements over previous releases.
* Memory usage: Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox 3 over a web browsing session. Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned.
* Reliability: A user's bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences are now stored in a transactionally secure database format which will prevent data loss even if their system crashes.
Homepage - http://www.mozilla-europe.org
Download Firefox 3.0.7 for Windows - 7.15 MB
Download Firefox 3.0.7 for Linux - 8.66 MB
Download Firefox 3.0.7 for MacOS - 17.1 MB
Download Firefox 3.0.7 Portable
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Experience the web, Apple Style, with Safari - the fastest, easiest to use web browser in the world. With its simple, elegant interface, Safari gets out of your way and lets you enjoy the web - up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer.
Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. and included in Mac OS X. It was first released as a public beta on January 7, 2003, and a final version was included as the default browser in Mac OS X v10.3. A beta version for Windows was released for the first time on June 11, 2007. Safari also runs on Wine, although the graphics do not display properly.
Safari has a bookmark management scheme that functions like the iTunes jukebox software, integrates Apple's QuickTime multimedia technology, and features a tabbed-browsing interface. A Google search box is a standard component of the Safari interface, as are software services that automatically fill out web forms, manage passwords via Keychain and spell check entries into web page text fields. The browser also includes an integrated pop-up ad blocker. An associated software from Apple is the Web Inspector - a DOM Inspector-like utility that lets users and developers browse the Document Object Model of a web page.
Since the release of Safari, its browser usage share has been climbing. For the month of May 2007, thecounter.com shows that Safari has a usage share of 2.86%; NetApplications.com reports that Safari has a usage share of 4.59% as of April 2007, an increase of 1.33 percentage points since May 2006.
12 reasons you'll love Safari:
• Blazing performance.
Safari is the fastest web browser on any platform.
• Elegant user interface.
Safari’s clean look lets you focus on the web — not your browser.
• Easy bookmarks.
Organize your bookmarks just like you organize music in iTunes.
• Pop-up blocking.
Say goodbye to annoying pop-up ads and pop-under windows.
• Inline Find.
Search any text on any website with the integrated Find banner.
• Tabbed browsing.
Open and switch between multiple web pages in a single window.
• SnapBack.
Instantly snap back to search results or the top level of a websit
• Forms AutoFill.
Let Safari complete online forms for you, automatically and securely.
• Built-in RSS.
RSS tells you when new content is added to your favorite sites.
• Resizable text fields.
Resize text fields on any website: Just grab the corner and drag.
• Private Browsing
Keep your online activities private with a single click.
• Security
Apple engineers designed Safari to be secure from day one.
Homepage - http://www.apple.com/safari/
Size: 19.6 MB
Download Safari 3.2.2 (with incl. QuickTime)
Plug-ins for Safari on Windows
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