After the great leap forward in speed, design, and overall polish that Mozilla’s open source Firefox Web browser enjoyed in ( ), it’s probably understandable that version 3.5 represents a more modest advancement. While it doesn’t stand out dramatically from its predecessor, the new version does bring Firefox closer to the cutting edge of Web standards, and offers a handful of clever innovations in privacy that its rivals would do well to steal for themselves. But the browser’s much-ballyhooed claims of a big speed boost aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Benchmarking the beast On its Web site, Mozilla touts version 3.5 as “the fastest Firefox ever.” But that claim refers solely to its new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which handles many of the Web’s interactive elements, but not the fundamental rendering of HTML code. Its assertion that Firefox 3.5 is more than twice as fast as its predecessor here is true–but Mozilla doesn’t elaborate on how the new version compares to rivals. And while its JavaScript performance has definitely improved from 3.0, Firefox 3.5’s speed in other areas actually seems to have decreased.

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Mozilla bases its speed-boost claims on results from the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark. My own SunSpider tests, on a 2GHZ aluminum MacBook with 2GB of RAM, roughly matched Mozilla’s results. Firefox 3.0.10 completed the test in 3,645.8 milliseconds, while Firefox 3.5 roared past it in 1,464.4 milliseconds. But Mozilla understandably does not mention that Apple’s rival ( ) browser could soundly thump both of them in the same test, clocking in at 756.4 milliseconds–nearly twice as fast as Firefox 3.5. Safari 4 also bested Firefox 3.5 in the XHTML and CSS rendering tests I ran–but surprisingly, so did Firefox 3.0. Firefox 3.5 displayed a local copy of the XHTML test file in 2.66 seconds, compared to 2.55 seconds for Firefox 3.0 and 0.49 seconds for Safari 4.

In CSS rendering, Firefox 3.5 took 361 milliseconds to complete the same locally hosted test that took Firefox 3.0 355 milliseconds, and Safari 4 just 35 milliseconds. However, Firefox 3.5 fared much better than its predecessor in Web standards compliance. It scored a 93 out of 100 on the Acid3 test, handily beating Firefox 3.0’s 71, and successfully handled 576 of 578 selectors in a CSS3 compliance test, compared to Firefox 3.0’s 371. (Safari 4 got perfect scores on both tests.) Despite these test results, it’s important to note that Firefox 3.5 never felt sluggish in normal use. In my tests, it rendered Web pages quickly, displayed code that thwarted earlier browsers without a hiccup, and seemed just as nimble and responsive as Safari 4. The Forget About This Site feature lets you trim entire sites from your browser’s history–although the version we tested sometimes wasn’t forgetful enough.

The latest tech Firefox 3.5, like Safari 4, includes support for the latest additions to the still-developing HTML 5 markup language, including the ability to play video and audio files without any special plug-ins. Unfortunately, Apple and Mozilla each support only one of the two video formats HTML 5 embraces. Apple prefers its homegrown H.264 codec, while Mozilla advocates the open-source Ogg Theora standard. Mozilla 3.5 does a great job playing Ogg Theora files, but chokes on YouTube’s HTML 5 test page and its H.264-based clip. Other HTML 5 features, including support for the canvas element (used to draw graphics using scripting), worked perfectly in Firefox 3.5, and it handled example pages of the emerging JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data format just fine. Firefox 3.5, like Safari 4, also supports the ability to display downloadable fonts, but this feature’s not yet in common use on the Web. In addition, Firefox 3.5 boasts support for location-aware browsing, a new feature that may strike some users as incredibly cool, and others as creepily Orwellian.

Sites that employ location-aware browsing can use data about the network to which you’re connected to plot your geographic position–for example, to automatically bring up a list of all the restaurants within three blocks of your computer. Privacy buffs will be glad to know that this feature’s strictly opt-in. Firefox 3.5 clearly warns you when a site wants to learn your location, and it lets you grant sites access on a case-by-case basis. Besides, for now the feature seems to exist only on a handful of test pages, in which it’s used only to display your current location on a map. Protecting privacy Firefox 3.5 does more than any previous version of the browser to keep your surfing safe from prying eyes. Mozilla has finally implemented its own version of Safari’s “Private Browsing” feature, which works as advertised; once in private mode, you can surf to all the sites you like, and leave no trace behind in your history.

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