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Firefox 3.5: Earlier today LifeHacker mentioned that Firefox 3.5 could be pushed out as an official release as soon as Tuesday, June 30. Now PC Magazine is reporting that Mozilla has officially confirmed the Tuesday release. Among other additions, Firefox 3.5 will include a Private Browsing Mode to hide browser activity, a JavaScript engine known as TraceMonkey, new location services, and HTML5 support.

A Windows only experimental Firefox extension called FoxTab introduces a new tab switching interface to Firefox. FoxTab comes complete with five different thumb nailed views and man is it awesome.

FoxTab provides a new fascinating and elegant method for finding and selecting a tab in the browser.
FoxTab is designed to be suitable for many types of users, those with only few tabs opened and
those out there (like me) who usually have tons of opened tabs to select from.
The idea behind FoxTab is to provide new visual methods for quick tab switching.

We already know that FireFox 3.1 will have a new tab switching interface. But why wait, this thing is awesome. Take a look at these screenshots:

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FireFox has always been a good browser, but as of the latest release has become THE browser that I use daily. FireFox extensions make it wickedly powerful. As a web developer I find many of the extensions invaluable. Here’s the best of the best…

Web developer`s toolbar

Web Developer`s tool bar probably will become one of the best plugins You`ve ever seen. It comes with his own tool bar that gives many useful tools for analyzing, validating and optimizing web-pages. The great thing about this plugin is that it’s on a few different browsers, so if you switch between them you will be able to use the same plugin on all.

Web Developer Toolbar

Firebug

Firebug is pretty similar as web developer, but it comes across with few different powerful options. You have an ability to edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript right in any web page.

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CNET ran benchmarks on the newly release Google Chrome browser. It turns out that not only does Chrome beat the competition, it completely annihilated them.

Here’s the site description of the speed tests:

• Richards: OS kernel simulation benchmark, originally written in BCPL by Martin Richards (539 lines).

• DeltaBlue: One-way constraint solver, originally written in Smalltalk by John Maloney and Mario Wolczko (880 lines).

• Crypto: Encryption and decryption benchmark based on code by Tom Wu (1,689 lines).

• RayTrace: Ray tracer benchmark based on code by Adam Burmister (3,418 lines).

• EarleyBoyer: Classic Scheme benchmarks, translated to JavaScript by Florian Loitsch’s Scheme2Js compiler (4,682 lines).

Get the full scoop over at CNET.

Google announced it will release a brand new open source web browser called Google Chrome. Yesterday a site went up, and has subsequently been taken down at http://gears.google.com/chrome/?hl=en (as of this morning clicking this link take you back to regular old Google).

According to Crunchbase the features include:

• Tabbed browsing where each tab gets its own process, leading to faster and more stable browsing. If one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn’t go down with it
• A distinct user interface that places tabs on top of the browser window instead of right below the address bar
• An “incognito” mode that lets you browse the web in complete privacy because it doesn’t record any of your activity
• A new JavaScript engine built from the ground up for speed
• Malware and phishing lists that automatically update themselves and warn you of bad websites
• A default homepage that displays your most commonly used sites and other personalized information

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