Having looked forward to Firefox 3.5 for awhile I looked forward to it popping up in the Ubuntu repositories, yet it still hasn't appeared in them. Fear not though a quick Google search reveals its easy when you know how, to install the latest version. Great, so I installed it, but then found Flash wasn't working any more. As I'm using the 64 bit version of Ubuntu, I'm used to slight incompatibilities occasionally. Again a quick search on my favourite search engine and I found a solution here. I was also worried my favourite extensions wouldn't work, yet i had no trouble after a few updates. The only plugin that I found to be incompatible was Novell Moonlight, which I hardly use, and will most likely be updated soon. I've found Firefox 3.5 to be impressively fast, even running at a reasonable speed on my old 400Mhz PowerMac G4. I've not explored everything yet, but I am impressed by the new restore feature that allows you to choose which tabs to restore in case one of them crashed the browser, which is a nifty feature and one that I've always wanted.
My Favourite Firefox Extensions:
Adblock Plus - absolutely essential!
Caught Up - allows you to play ITV Play in Firefox on Linux!
Delicious bookmarks - bookmark sharing plugin
Downloadhelper - for easy download of YouTube videos
Download Statusbar - shows downloads on Firefox's status bar
External IP - shows your IP address for your net connection
Fierr - replaces the default error page with a more stylish alternative.
Flashblock - Replaces flash objects with a button so you can selectively play them, ideal on Flash-heavy pages, like the hideous Myspace!
PDF Download - Allows you to choose whether you want to view or download PDF files.
ReloadEvery - reloads web pages every so many secons or minuites.
StumbleUpon - browse through random pages for when you're bored
TabScope - preview and navigate tab contents
VideoSurf - shows stills of videos of sites like youtube, and choose where you want to view the video from.
Xmarks - sync bookmarks between browsers on all your PCs and Macs - usually the second plugin i install after Adblockplus!
Update
It seems my Java plugin is broken :( ah well probably just use Opera for java stuff.
Update 2
I can attest to Firefox 3.5's stability, I've had 30 or more tabs in Firefox on Ubuntu with no problems and no noticable slowdown.
Update 3
I have now switched to Swiftfox 3.5.2 which has optimised builds for different CPUs and also has a PPA for Deb packages. It's setup to be faster than a normal build of Firefox.
Update 4!
Found an even better tutorial on getting 3.5.3 on Ubuntu here
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