When Mozilla made the transition from the Firefox 2.x series to the current 3.x series, they broke a record by netting over 8 million downloads in the first day it was available. Much of this was due to a very successful PR campaign. Firefox 3.5 was released without all that fanfare, but still managed to hold its own. Enough people were interested in the update to net Mozilla over 5 million downloads in the first 24 hours of availability.

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I haven't noticed a good speed improvement. In fact, it takes a little longer to do a cold start

As a non tech person, all I can say is firefox works an IE8 dosen't

really didn't observe much of a difference in the speeds of FF 3.0 and FF 3.5. The private browsing feature sucks. Chrome and Opera make better browser for private browsing. I aint a fanboy of either browsers but FF 3.0 seemed better than FF 3.5.

i've been using 3.0 since it was released and 2.0, but 3.5 is better, i've noticed its slightly quicker and more responsive, What i also like is 90% of my addons still work (unlike between 2.0 - 3.0 where almost non worked). overall its not a huge update and did take longer than expected to come out but still quite impressed =) keep up the good work Mozilla!

I agree with everything burty117 just said. I've noticed a speed increase but honestly I didn't think it was slow before LOL. Most of my add-ons still work except for a couple which I hope updates are soon released as well. At least Mozilla is trying to keep its product fresh unlike MS which sadly allowed the IE browsers to rapidly fall to the rear of just about all the alternative browsers.

i have not noticed a great improvement in speed as i upgraded to firefox 3.5 from 3.0.
but still some sites seem to load much faster than b4.
private bowsing is a good addition to the great firefox.
however i think they can make the option much more available (hidden in TOOLS) and easy to switch like Bookmarks star button.
googe images and yahoo sites are all loading way faster than before.
but many of my addons have been disabled.
anyway firefox has done a great job including many new additions...
GO FIREFOX GO MOZILLA
and all the masterminds behind it

It's still lags behind other lesser used browsers in pure speed, problem for some is compatibility with pages that use in depth programming to function.

I'm still waiting for an official, native 64bit Firefox and support for individual processes per tab.

They destroyed the settings...

I may be going back to 3 in a day or so.

it sometimes freezes when I try to start it up. I have to open it again for the browser to actually show, but by that time, I already have 2 windows opened up. This also was a problem in Firefox 3, but they ended up patching it up.

I dont see any significance in speed. The only thing I see different is teh Tab button.

There seem to be odd slowdown issues when running AJAX or JS heavy pages, a few users running Windows 7 RC have noticed these issues and are trying to come up with common scenarios here:
https://support.mozilla.com/tiki-vie...1063&forumId=1

I'm not even sure if this is limited to FF 3.5 only or also the latest iterations of FF 3, but Chrome and even IE don't show this erratic behavior.

5 million downloads in 24 hours is great! Firefox 3.5 is speaking for itself. There have been many complaints but I haven't had any problems yet. Most of my add-ons like Juice, Billeo, Personas, FoxTab are compatible with 3.5. It is faster too. I like the tabbed browsing feature. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12715