Mozilla has released the latest and possibly last beta version of Firefox 3.5 in what could be one of the fastest QA cycles I remember: the released build is dated April 24, so it is has been only 4 days in quality control. It must be noted however that Firefox QA is an ongoing process that takes place with each daily build. Also, last Friday, the build day, was a Test Day so it got a particularly high number of testers which may have sped things up.

If you have been following Firefox 3.5 development, you will find there is not much to “see” in this release as there may be to “feel”, since most of the bug fixes revolved around performance improvements and particular cases.

For those catching up with Firefox 3.5 (formerly known as 3.1), here’s a quick list of the most relevant changes:

• There is a lot of web developer oriented improvements including long expected font embedding that allows the distribution of fonts so a web page looks exactly as the author intended.
• In the same front, Firefox 3.5 supports the HTML 5 audio and video tags and bundles Vorbis  and Theora encoders so content posted in these open video and audio formats will play without any download required.
• TraceMonkey is the implementation of a dramatic JavaScript performance improvement based on JIT techniques that make Firefox 3.5 notably faster executing web based applications.
• Places and web feed updating is snappier with improved queries and smarter live bookmarks checking and retrieving.
• The privacy front has gotten a lot of attention with the introduction of a new private browsing mode which will clear all your tracks as soon as you close Firefox or end a private session. New option in the Clear Private Data dialog now let you clear your tracks for a certain number of hours or forget everything about a certain site via the Library.
• After a crash, you can select which tabs to restore to prevent crashing again.
• Support for multitouch interfaces on Mac OS X: pinch, swipe and twist to zoom, navigate, and switch tabs.
• Tab bar always visible now by default, a new tab button, tab cloning (Ctrl + drag), tab detaching and reattaching (drag and drop), all make tabbed browsing just more powerful.
• Support for passing geolocation to web services that may use it is in. You will be prompted when a service requires the information and you can provide it with different levels of accuracy.

For more details, check my previous Firefox 3.5 Beta 2 review.

Among the visible changes in Beta 4, there is a deep simplification of the Privacy page in the Options window. This is how it looks now:

As you can see, a very simple and clean page where you can tell Firefox to remember everything as in previous versions (the default), to remember nothing (work in Private Mode all the time), or a middle point where you specify what exactly to remember: passwords, downloads, a certain number of days, etc. Also note there are now options to prevent the location bar suggesting items from your history or bookmakrs which may reveal more than you want to a visitor.

Which better resembles Firefox 3′s privacy page:

The Clear Recent History window (accessible from the Tools menu) is also smaller but still lets you clean your tracks for the past n hours and you can define what tracks to clean.

In brief, Firefox 3.5 is pretty much ready with just a few bugs ahead blocking the final release. It is not a revolutionary release, but is oriented to support and boost some new web technologies like geolocation, video and dozens of other specifications, in true Mozilla-fashion way: implementing and supporting the existing open standards.

Perhaps most of what remains ahead is on the hands of add-on developers who have the responsibility to make their themes and extensions ready for the big Firefox 3.5 release (which should be just weeks ahead). Historically, this has been one of the biggest complaints in each Firefox release.

For Mozilla platform and Firefox developers, Shiretoko is coming to an end, and is once again time to get back to the wish lists, look at the current state of the web, imagine the future, and code Namoroka.

Get Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, now available in 70 languages. Sev-en-ty.