First look at stable Firefox 3.5
When Mozilla invites you to download Firefox 3.5 oblige.
While it did take me several minutes to download the file this morning, the result seemed worthwhile.
All my regular add-ons loaded right away — your mileage may vary. I did find performance improved across the news sites I regularly visit. Even the most file-heavy such sites, like Weather.Com (with its time-release weather maps) moved well.
By contrast I had grown accustomed to a white bar near the top of Firefox 3.0. This was a visible sign that it was having trouble loading content.
I usually keep a half-dozen tabs open at any one time — prospective stories, mail — and run several other programs at the same time as well. My system tray is filled with crap that loads at start-up some of which I never use. And the main Windows machine here has moved twice with PC Relocator, which brings my crap along with my software.
In short this is a bad, dirty nasty naughty PC, with a highly fragmented hard drive and a lot of other programs fighting for processor attention. If Firefox works well here and (so far) it does, imagine what it can do on your nice, clean, obedient and well-tended machine.