Please try Firefox 3.5

I’m very pleased with the new release of the Firefox browser. While I’ve generally been pleased by Firefox’s features, it has become slower and more demanding of computing resources in recent versions. The new version corrects the lag, and adds a new feature besides: the ability to embed audio and video without a separate plugin.

Bloggers know the drill: if you want to embed a sound or video clip, you’d have to paste in some Javascript from YouTube or what-have-you.

If you use Firefox 3.5, it will play Ogg encoded audio and video linked from the page, which right now is most handy with media found at Wikipedia, as it uses Ogg, a free and open-source way of compressing and decompressing sound and video. So it’s a bit of a selfish request: I’d love Firefox 3.5 to get a large enough market share to make this simplified way of sharing media an option.

Get Firefox 3.5

Download Firefox 3, break record

The Mozilla Foundation is try to break a 24-hour software download world record — or rather, establish a mark — with its release of the newest version of its browser: Firefox 3. Having used it a while, I really like it.

Ubuntu Linux users have been getting updates of the preliminary versions (release candidates) and these have been available for other operating systems, so perhaps this is not news. (I’ve read that the only version that’s changed from the most recent release candidate is for Mac OS X.) But for those of you who have been using a Firefox 2.x version, you’ll note some great features, including being able to browse by title and bookmarking from the address bar. (So if you were looking for this blog, you could just type “bands” and it would come up. Then click the star to bookmark.) It also seems faster, which is a welcome improvement. And for Internet Explorers, don’t even look back. . . .

Either way, start your leap into Firefox 3 here.