firefox3-5Leaving Firefox almost 8 months ago was heart breaking, well at least as heart breaking as leaving a piece of software you’d watch grow up like your own child could be. Like many children however, Firefox grew up into a bit of mess, far too many things going on, not listening to its biggest fans and sadly but surely becoming lethargic and slow.

Like Stallone in Rocky III however, it took a competitor to kick Firefox’s butt into gear and despite the relative disappointment of Firefox 3.0 which was better but similarly sluggish, 3.5 is an all new and remarkably improved Firefox (at least in my eyes and on OS X).

Thanks to its TraceMonkey JavaScript engine (amongst other things), its snappy, pages load fast, launches fast, restarting is a breeze, adding a few new extensions seems to have little impact on speed and above all, I’m rarely visited by the spinning wheel of death.

Although I do miss Safari’s integration into OS X and believe it or not, one specific plug-in “Safari140” (for twitter). Firefox’s plethora of extensions adequately makes up for what I’m missing.

Of course it isn’t just its speed that’s impressive, it includes built in geo-location aware browsing, support for HTML 5 and downloadable fonts, a smarter session restore, quick & easy private/porn mode browsing and Safari like Tab Tearing. But above all else mentioned, it feels like the most reliable Firefox yet, which lets face it, for a while there it seemed Firefox might eventually morph itself into the equivalent of today’s Internet Explorer.

Firefox 3.5, we salute you.