The IT Nerd

There’s a rumor floating around that FireFox 3.5 will make an appearance tomorrow. At least, that’s what The Register says:

Mozilla is expected to spin out a complete version of Firefox 3.5 tomorrow, more than six months on from when it had originally planned to release the browser.

A company rep confirmed on Friday that 30 June had been earmarked for the day Firefox 3.5 would be shipped.

That didnt exactly convince me that it’s going to happen. But a quick Google search turns up other news sites with the same story. So perhaps this more fact than rumor. We’ll see tomorrow. So that brings me to the next question, what does FireFox 3.5 get you? Here’s a brief list:

• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.
• 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: HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.

All of which may make me switch back from Safari which is my browser de jour. If they do ship it tomorrow, I’ll download a copy (or two) and post my impressions here.

These days, if you blink you’ll miss a Firefox update. Less than a week after the last Firefox update comes Firefox 3.0.10 which fixes a security issue as well as a “major stability issue.” Check the release notes for more details. To get it, click “Help” followed by “Check For Updates” or you can download it here.

If you check Firefox’s update function, you’ll see that Firefox 3.0.9 is out. The main focus of this update is to fix a number of security issues, but there’s a bunch of other fixes according to the release notes. In any case, it’s a good idea to download this update either by clicking “Help” and “Check For Updates” or by clicking here.

It’s only been a short amount of time since Firefox 3.0.7 hit the streets and there’s a new update available to download. Firefox 3.0.8 fixes two zero day exploits. I wonder if these exploits have anything to do with the fact that Firefox was “pwned” in the recent Pwn2Own competition. I checked the official Mozilla blog and it doesn’t say. In any case, the release notes that explain what was fixed are here. You can download the latest version by going to Help and choosing Check For Updates or by going here.

Firefox users should use their “check for updates” function tonight as Firefox 3.0.7 is now available. The release notes are available here, and the download page is available here.

Download away!

Everybody’s except Steve Ballmer favorite web browser Firefox has an update that you should download when you get the chance. Firefox 3.0.6 fixes some security and stability issues. In particular one where some users experienced a problem where parts of the screen were not properly displaying after Firefox was open for long periods of time. The full  release notes can be found here.

You can of course grab a copy from here or use the update feature within Firefox to get up to date.

Firefox 3.0.3 has just hit the streets to fix a bug where users were unable to retrieve saved passwords or save new passwords. I guess it was serious enough that Mozilla put out a fix for it just days after Firefox 3.0.2. If you want to read the release notes (which aren’t that long) on this, click here. If you want to download this fix, use the update function within your browser or click here.