Firefox 3.5 RC Lands, Final Version In June

Nice to see someone else not just frothing with excitement about Firefox. All the new features may be great, but it's too damn slow to load and is clunky to use. The add-ons may be great, but for 98% of browing Chrome just works faster and more elegantly, hell even IE seems easier.

I think what they're doing with Firefox is amazing and certainly the future. But I think they've just been building it on stodgy foundations. It's like Vista a great idea, but too slow and poorly implemented. They need to Windows 7 it, give it a decent polish and make things clearer. Maybe FF4, for if not Chrome's going to catch up.

Not that I even understand the race, what difference does it make if I browse with FF, IE, Safari, etc? What's the business model for all this? Where do they make money? Search I understand, that's advertising, but not the browsers themselves.

@HK

I'll reserve judgement until 3.5 is officially released. But with the competition really upping their game, Mozilla can't afford to mess 3.5 up. Chrome could become the browser of choice for most tech-savvy people once add-on scene is up and running and if 3.5 disappoints people, I can see Firefox's market share dropping off as some people jump to alternatives.

I've avoided installing beta versions of 3.5, but is the bookmark system revamped or is it the same catastrophic mess that was implemented in v3.0? I find it amazing that the only browser that has a decent bookmark manager is the much maligned Internet Explorer!

chrome is faster than FF? since it first came out i havent seen anything special, i always found the page rendering slower then FF and IE and with no add-ons for me its pointless.

For me FF is fast and allows me to customise my web experience how I see fit (adblock plus is a must have, still shocks me when i visit certain websites without it), as for it opening slow, yea i agree but it is also loading close to 30 tabs so maybe thats my problem.

@Steve: the bookmarking is good in IE? not 7 though surely? I find it ridiculous, getting favorites on bar below the address is long winded, you cant drag and drop onto the bar either whereas FF is more intuitive, plus i love typing in the address bar and it finding my bookmarks or pages ive visited, just have to be careful theres nothing dodgy in the history or everyone sees you the dodgy site you were looking at in the middle of the night.. tsk tsk