Need to Know: Firefox 3.5

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The new version also supports HTML5, the latest web standard and this contains support for a new video tag – which means that you’ll be able to watch video in your browser without any need for a plug-in. The videos are in the open source Ogg Theora format though, and Daily Motion is the only major video site to support it as yet.

Other new bits include an ‘In-Private’ mode – just hit ‘Ctrl-shift-P’ to stop Firefox from remembering your browsing session – perfect for searching for that new job or - ‘ahem’ – other activities. You can also tell 3.5 to forget a site you’ve been to after the fact, just by finding and deleting in the history.

Tear it Up

We also like being able to tear off your tab and drag it out to make a new windows (nicked from Chrome) and ‘Location Aware Browsing’, so if you’re searching for information you don’t need to tell it anything – it knows where you are. Yes, you can turn it off, you paranoid people.

Downloadable fonts can help make web site start to look ‘the way the director intended’. This means you don’t need to have a font already on your system for the web page to use it, negating the need for designers to user static images, which makes for a more editable and searchable internet.

Finally, the ‘session restore’ has been improved, so in the event of a unexpected shut-down or crash, everything is remembered, which could be great if you’re composing an email in the browser.

Sounds awesome! When can I get it?

Now. Firefox 3.5 is available for download.

Look out for our full review of the full version on the site later this week.

Want to read more background on the latest IT topics? Click here for all the tech cheatsheets in our Need to Know series.

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