Firefox 3.5 has just been released, you can grab it and take it for a test drive yourself by downloading it at this link.

Just a few new features in the new version, to help you decide:

quote http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.5/releasenotes/

Firefox 3.5 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use. Some of the notable features are:

• Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)
• Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)
• 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: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

I downloaded it like two days ago, and it is very sweet.
I LOVE the fact that when it can-t recover your tabs, it tells you it's embarrassed because it couldn't recover them, and then you have a chance to try again.
I haven't lost a tabs session ever since I got this. Very nice thing, absolutely.

It's slow on startup.

Really, it's slow on startup? Was hoping this would fix that, going to update as soon as I finish updating compatibility on these addons. 3 has always been slow on startup for me, 2 was always instant.

Edit: Starts up much faster.

This message was edited by Nath on Jul 03 2009.

Maybe its because my homepage is yahoo...

theres your problem mate. yahoo is a fun filled [/sarcasm] place with lots of flash!

basically what im trying to say is that a large resource using program, plus a media rich homepage, equals slow loading. isnt there a firefox preloader though? if youre really concerned with slow startups, then use it.

I dislike how it (by default) won't allow you to close the last tab. I have Speed Dial to load on new tabs, so before, I could just click the last tab to get back to it. The new tab button is useless as well.

The crash recovery is nice though, when Firefox crashes twice in a row, it'll give you a 'what tabs do you want to recover' screen.

I don't like it, so I went back to the previous version.

Except add-on incompatibilities, I'm loving it.

quote

I dislike how it (by default) won't allow you to close the last tab. I have Speed Dial to load on new tabs, so before, I could just click the last tab to get back to it. The new tab button is useless as well.

Useless to you and I, yes. However, I think that the button was added to give the tabs feature more visibility to people who have never known that it existed.