First Look: Firefox 3.5

and iPod touch also use wireless access points as one method of determining location.) I was only able to test from home, and it worked quite well from here (on Flickr's map page). As more Web sites become location-aware, I believe this feature will become even more useful. (Opera also offers location-aware browsing.)

Other changes

Behind the scenes, there are myriad changes designed to improve your browsing experience. In addition to the already-noted changes to the page rendering engine, Firefox 3.5 supports downloadable fonts, and HTML 5's local storage, offline applications, and the new audio and video elements that make it much simpler to include audio and video on a Web page. There's much more for developers, if you're interested in the nitty-gritty details.

There are, of course, numerous small improvements. The awesome bar--Mozilla's name for the browser's location bar--is now awesomer (more awesome?). Tab handling has been improved, and now features Safari-like abilities to drag-and-drop tabs on and off the tab bar, and to rearrange them by dragging. Session restore can now recover even the text in a web form you were typing in when your machine or Firefox unexpectedly quit. Firefox is now available in more than 70 languages, and there are another dozen or so in beta.

While I doubt any of these changes will be enough to sway someone set on their current browser to make the switch, the changes do bring tangible improvements to Firefox, and add some welcome new features. Macworld will have a full review of Firefox 3.5 soon.

[It seems like only a year ago that senior editor Rob Griffiths was taking Firefox 3 out for a spin.]

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* web browsers,

* Safari