So the other day I noticed that my FireFox was letting me know that V3.5 was ready to download and upgrade, great I thought the next version which had been promised to be faster that previous incarnations of the browser.

Without any hesitation I updated my Firefox to 3.5 and found several thing straight away!

For starters a few plugin that I use were not compatible with 3.5 and were disabled, not too much of a fuss as there were only two that wouldn’t work one was the Microsoft .NET framework assistant and the other was the EntreCard Toolbar, now the toolbar is something that I do use, so not been able to use it has caused a drop in my EC, but I’ve had to resort to the original method of dropping, for now anyway.

The other thing I noticed after running Firefox 3.5 for the first time is that it’s faster, not turbo fast, but as least twice as fast as the earlier version which has made my browsing that bit faster.

So here’s a run down from the Firefox site on what’s new:

Firefox 3.5  is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the earlier version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use. Some of the notable features are:

• Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)
• Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

Developers can find out about all the changes and new features at the Mozilla Developer Center.

So far everything is running great, I have noticed an increase in speed on sites that I used to visit and this is great, if your not too fussy about your plugin and can wait for the updates to arrive then I would recommend updating now, if you are concerned with your plugins, then just give it a little longer and then upgrade, by which time those plugin should have upgrade

I been using Googles Chome browser for a while now, at first everyone was saying “you won’t believe how fast it is!”, surely it can’t be that fast, well it is that fast.

My browsing speed has increased incredible, ok so it looks sparse compared to my trusty FireFox 3, but you don’t mind if it makes you browser quicker. I was also asked when installing Chrome to import my bookmarks etc from FireFox which also saved me time.

There is still a lot of “updating” to be done to the browser and I did read somewhere that Google have started developing plugins, which is great, but they may slow it down a bit, but we will see.

But to be honest I just so impressed with the speed that the browser accesses the net, as an example with an empty browser cache my last.fm profile page takes around 15-20secs to fully load on FireFox 3 and 6-10secs with Google Chrome

So I would recommend everyone giving it a try, ok, so you may not like the bare look it has or the fact that there are not that many plugins for it at the moment, but it is worth a try, I do still go back to my trusty FireFox for the toolbars and plugins that I use, but, sometimes I just want to browse quickly if I’m short on time and Google Chrome is really useful for that reason.