We started writing Enquiring Mimes just over a year ago and one of our first entries was intended to convince you to start using the Firefox browser. Mozilla had, amidst great hoopla,  just released Firefox 3.

We gave you a number of reasons to switch if you were still using MS Internet Explorer — they’re probably still true today, but the landscape changed.  There are now two other competitive web browsers, Google Chrome and Apple Safari, both very fast and by comparison their speed made Firefox 3 seem very slow.

Our story has a happy ending. Firefox 3.5, a major release, has been sent out into the world and once again, Firefox is great.  They replaced the Java engine and it’s now as fast as the other guys and there’s a lot to like.  It’s nice to come home to Firefox without sacrificing speed and there are more great plug-ins than ever.

Here’s the top five best features of Firefox 3.5

• Fast – according to betanews.com, Firefox 3,5 is 251% faster than Firefox 3.
• Location-aware browsing – if you let it, Firefox can figure out where you are and give location information to sites you’ve approved providing you a more local experience.
• Support for new web technology -  This will be a benefit in the future as sites begin to use the new features like downloadable fonts
• Better handling of tabs and windows – easier recovery of mistakenly closed tabs and windows.
• Private browsing – Firefox will keep no records of your browsing if you head for the wrong side of the tubes.

Here was our list from last year for Firefox 3: (all still true, “great performance” has been regained)

• Secure
• Great performance
• Smart URL bar learns how you browse
• Smart bookmarks
• Smarter “Remembered Password” handling
• Good security and malware protection
• Use it on Windows, Mac and Linux

Download Firefox 3.5.

Related articles

• Top 5 Killer Features in Firefox 3.5 (mashable.com)

The reason I ask, is Google sent a team into Times Square in NYC to ask about browsers and found that only 8% of the folks interviewed actually knew what was a browser. Most seemed to confuse browsers and search engines.

Now this was probably a pretty unscientific sample but also probably fairly typical. I’m not sure Google’s point in this exercise but it comes off a bit like a sequence of Jay Leno’s “Jay Walking”.

Related articles

• Google Asks Common Man “What is a Browser?” Common Man Has No Clue [Video] (mashable.com)

Opera proved again this week they have been thinking outside the box.

They had been promising they’d announce news that would “re-invent the web”.  To support rhetoric like that, I was hoping the news would be more than just their Version 10 browser was out of beta.  Instead the announcement was Opera Unite, functionality that will allow Opera users to actually provide services from their web browser to other users on the web without the need to go through the “middleman” of a web server.

The sample services currently provided  tend to not be very original, a virtual refrigerator door to which you can allow others users to pin notes, a chat application so that you can host your own chat sessions, media sharing, file sharing and photo sharing.  Cool but not earthshaking (they admit it, they are just demo services.

The most interesting and possibly provocative of the initial services is a web server.   Imagine being able to easily post pages and files that could be seen by your dispersed family, your small workgroup, PTA, club, team or any small group that you’d like to be able to to disseminate information.  Pages can be public or password protected.

I also mentioned provocative since Opera will be forced to prove that they’re not creating a security risk by increasing the chance of hacking and contamination on individual users’ computers.

Still, the possibilities are endless if developers create sharing services for business and home that can be run directly on a web browser.  Expect to see this concept again in other browsers, they all “borrow. You can now not only own the printing press but the web server, too.

Download the Opera version with Opera Unite (alpha release).

Their pitch:

Mosaic Browser Logo credit: CSA/University of Illinois

The Browser wars are heating up again after years of only minor scrimmages and few battles.

The original browser wars of the 90′s was between the giant Netscape and the well-funded challenger Microsoft Internet Explorer. The questions asked then was had Microsoft lost the Internet or would they be able to come from behind and create a credible challenge against Netscape’s market dominance.

When the dust from that battle cleared, Netscape was gone, having been acquired by AOL and Microsoft Internet Explorer has remained the leading browser for a decade. Microsoft IE, as it’s often called, reached it’s highest strength in the middle of this decade. It has steadily lost some of its domination to Mozilla Firefox, an open source browser, owing some of it’s past support, if not code, to Netscape. By May 2009, Firefox had gained 22.5% of the browser market after IE.

Recent years have seen gains by Apple’s Safari browser, originally on Macs and then last fall, another open source browser, this time in conjunction with Google.  An always credible, but lightly used on desktops entry has been the Opera browser which is used more widely on mobile devices.

Each browser has it’s own niche, Firefox makes effective use of “plug-ins” to add functionality, Internet Explorer works best on certain websites that employed Microsoft web software for building pages and since it’s bundled with Windows it is the default choice for Windows user, as Safari is on the Mac — Opera is more of a suite of Internet products including browser, email and newsreaders in the old style of Netscape,

Over the last 15 years of the Internet, the job of the browser has changed dramatically from being like a slide projector that retrieves and displays static images to today, when many applications that are used on computers are really services (read programs) that run in a browser.  These services tend to be written in a scripting language called Javascript, so the faster your browser can run Javascript, the faster is your browser.

With the release of Google Chrome, the battleground for browsers became speed, since Chrome was indeed very very speedy and Internet Explorer, by comparison, was very very slow.  Chrome achieves it’s speed by using a very fast processing engine for running its Javascript.

Firefox has spent a year readying a new update to its Version 3 browser that promises a new Java engine speedier than its current. Apple Safari has recently released Version 4 which they call, though can’t necessarily prove (or to be more accurate, since browsers do so many different functions, any browser-make can find something to measure in their product which is the fastest), “The World’s Fastest Browser.”

I wanted to take a look at what kind of user was tending to use which browser and how the browsers were doing at competing, so I looked at the current month statistics for three sites to which I have access, this one, Enquiring Mimes, Sansanpups.com, a dog/pet blog written by Sandra and Win4Lin, a Linux software product site owned by Virtual Bridges.   All sites do fairly well as far as hits and page views and have similar levels of traffic.

What immediately seems interesting is that while the competition for browsers is considered to be overall a race between IE and Firefox, when you look at specific user profiles, the results vary.

Sansanpups, the most general purpose of our websites with maybe the least techie users, does indeed use Internet Explorer over any other browser, but these are people who read blogs, that’s makes them a little more advanced as useres right there, so Firefox runs a good race with a 25% share. Chrome and Safari are neck and neck with around 10% each.

For the Linux software site, probably being open source and available on Linux, Firefox has more than 50% share, but with still a sizable share is IE at 30%. The Linux-crowd has little interest in Safari (not available on Linux or Chrome, not yet available on Linux), but really not that much more interest in Konqueror, a Linux-only browser.

Now you, dear readers, and I’m proud of you, for it, are the most adventuresome, putting the leading browsers behind you and mostly using using Chrome and Safari, the two fastest browser almost tied around 25% apiece. Also, admitting my own prejudice as I have in the past, these are my two favorite browsers because of their speed.

Future of the Browser War? Expect to continue to see much emphasis on browsers as a means of dominating the conversation between the big-software-three Microsoft, Google, Apple and the open source Firefox, with continued innovations by Opera.

While to call me a developer would be a gross misuse of the term, I’ve been using the browser ever since it was released last week.  It is so cool.  Well actually so fast!

The team admits it’s far from finished.  Among other things, it doesn’t print, it doesn’t display YouTube-like videos and there seems to be not much in the way of bookmark management.  So let’s give it a number and say it’s 75% done. What it does well is render a web page really fast and when I’m digging around the web that’s what’s most important to me.

The Chronium Blog warns you not to download this version unless “take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.

How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things , you won’t yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print.”

It hasn’t crashed for me in about 20 hours of use.  The only gotcha for me was when checking a blog post and panicking when I couldn’t see the YouTube video, but I had been warned.

Anway, if you live life on the bleeding edge and are so Type A that anything faster is better, download the browser and give it a try on Mac or Linux.

As for me?  I’ll probably use it for most of my work on my slight aging Macbook because it just makes the experience so darn fast!

New Tab Page Improved: The New Tab page in Chrome, by default, shows large thumbnails of your most visited sites to help you navigate quickly to them. That’s normally pretty helpful and cool, as long as one of the sites you visit often isn’t one that you would just as soon people not know about, like say Perez Hilton. Now on the tab page you have the ability to delete sites that you’d just as soon not have the boss or the mate know that you thaaat much.

Full Screen Mode: Google Chrome, by it’s minimalism, by default, gives you plenty of room to view your web page. Sometimes you just want a little more. Now by toggling F11 key there is a full-screen mode to use every pixel available.

Form Autofill: The browser now, also has, Form Autofill so that as you fill out web forms, previous information that you have entered is added to forms automatically. Stored information can be cleared out from the tools menu.

Okay, now you can say, that’s nice but not very exciting, all browsers do that kind of stuff. Probably the most significant changes to Google Chrome is under the hood. Over 300 bugs that caused crashes have been fixed. Probably the most important to me, the reason I use Google Chrome, the fastest browser has gotten 30% faster.

If you’re already using Google Chrome, it will update automatically — if you want to give it a try, install it from google.com/chrome.

Anyway, it’s probably pretty lame but I like the product well enough to enjoy the commercials in their recent ad campaign.

If you share my appreciation for the commercials’ creativity, there is an entire series on YouTube made by independent studios.