In the few days since Firefox 3.5 was officially unleashed on the public, it's been downloaded well over 7 million times according to Mozilla's real-time download tracker. That's nowhere near the estimated 8 million downloads achieved in the first 24 hours after Firefox 3.0 launched, but it's still pretty good.

It's also probably worth pointing out that anyone who was running Firefox 3.5 RC3 on launch day probably isn't included in these numbers since RC3 is basically the same as the final release, which means if you had that version installed you didn't download any updates.

Now that there's a new version of Firefox, there's also a new version of Firefox Portable, which lets you run the browser from a USB flash drive. If you were running an older version of Firefox Portable you should be able to upgrade automatically from within the browser. But if you want to give Firefox 3.5 a try without installing it to your computer, the portable version is an excellent alternative.

And while Mozilla thinks Firefox 3.5 is stable enough to take remove the "beta" and "release candidate" labels, some Linux distributions might be slower to add the browser to their repositories. But that doesn't mean you can't install the browser manually. Kabatology has posted instructions for installing Firefox 3.5 in Ubuntu by typing a single line of code into a terminal window.

[via Lifehacker]

Ninja Roll 2 is a simple ball rolling game that has you drawing a line for your "ninja ball" to roll and bounce down. The goal of the game is to collect all of the stars on each level.

The game has a very sparse look, and the physics of the ball remind me of the superballs that I played with as a kid. It's actually frustrating how bouncy this ball is. Sometimes it's hard to maintain momentum because just as your ball is about to ascend a ramp, it hits some tiny bump and bounces off in an unexpected direction. To be fair, part of the fun of playing Ninja Roll 2 is watching the ball make crazy moves.

Some of the levels appear physically impossible at first, but that's where your ball's incredible bounciness becomes an advantage - you can make it perform moves that you would have never thought possible.

My only gripe with the game is that for some reason it was choppy to the point of almost being unplayable when running in Firefox, but in Safari it is perfectly smooth.

Firefox 3.5 is available for download today, following months of testing. The latest version of the web browser adds a ton of new features and bug fixes. Probably the most important thing is that it feels faster, thanks to a new Javascript engine and updated rendering engine.

But there are also a few new bells and whistles including a private browsing mode that lets you surf the web without saving any data to your computer. You know, because you don't want your spouse knowing what you're buying for their birthday. Because that's what you'll use this feature for.

There's also support for "tab tearing," which lets you drag and drop tabs between browser windows. Or you can drag a tab out of a browser window to create a new window. Firefox 3.5 also supports HTML video which lets you watch some videos embedded in web pages without any plugins.

Mozilla hasn't updated the official Firefox download page yet. But you can download Firefox 3.5 from a number of other sites including Softpedia and Filehippo.

Update: The change is now up at getfirefox.com.

Added: Direct download links (US English) straight from Mozilla:

Windows: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.5&os=win&lang=en-US

Mac: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.5&os=osx&lang=en-US

Linux: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.5&os=linux&lang=en-US

Mozilla has released an updated version of Weave, a Firefox plugin that lets you synchronize your profile, settings, and passwords across multiple computers. In other words, every time you change your bookmarks, web site login information, or other data on your work computer, the changes will be reflected on your home machine as long as you have Weave installed on both systems.

Weave 0.4 adds support for preference syncing, automatic logins, and support for Fennec 1.0 beta 2 for Maemo Linux. That last one means you the mobile version of Firefox for Nokia Internet Tablets can be configured to have all of your desktop bookmarks, passwords, and other settings with just a few clicks. Eventually Weave should also work with Fennec for Windows Mobile and other mobile platforms, which could save you an awful lot of time when setting up a mobile browser.

It looks like somebody at Mozilla is listening. Just yesterday, we asked when we could get a version of Firefox 3.5 that didn't have the silly "release candidate" next to its name. Now we have an answer: Tuesday.

Webmonkey and Betanews are both reporting that Mozilla has confirmed that's the date it will push out the full version of Firefox 3.5. The latest version of the popular web browser has been available for testing for months, but by removing the beta and/or RC label, Mozilla is essentially saying that the browser is ready for the public to use without fear of encountering major bugs of security flaws. You know, until some major bug of security flaw is discovered and Mozilla pushes out Firefox 3.5.1.

Firefox 3.5 includes a number of changes from Firefox 3.0, including faster Javascript rendering and a private browsing mode which allows you to surf without saving your personal data. It also supports viewing some web video in a browser without any plugins.

In related news, Mozilla's released an update to the mobile version of Firefox today. Fennec Beta 2 for Nokia Internet Tablets and Alpha 2 for Windows Mobile was released today. The latest version of Fennec includes performance tweaks and a new theme.

[via Mozilla Links]

Just a few days after pushing out the first release candidate for Firefox 3.5 to beta testers, Mozilla has made Firefox 3.5 RC2 available to the general public. While the only way to test out the first release candidate was to install Firefox 3.5 beta 4 and upgrade from within the browser, anyone can download and install the latest release candidate... or you can just wait until the full version of Firefox 3.5 is released, which should happen any day now.

Firefox 3.5 offers a ton of bug fixes and new features including:

• Private browsing mode that doesn't save your history or cached data when your browser session is over
• Tab tearing feature that lets you drag a tabs between browser windows or drag a tab into a new window
  
• Watch a video in your browser without any plugins or external programs

Sure, some of these features have been available in other browsers like Google Chrome since day one. But it's nice to see them coming to Firefox. Firefox 3.5 RC2 is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Firefox has a few hidden menus that let you adjust settings or find detailed information about your web browser. For instance, typing "about:config" (without the quotation marks) into the address bar bring sup a whole slew of advanced settings options.

Future builds of Firefox will also have an "about:me" screen that will show you which web sites you visit most frequently and what time of day you do most of your browsing. But if you can't wait for Firefox 3.6, you can install a add-on that will add an about:me option to Firefox 3.0 or 3.5 beta.

Once the add-on is installed, you can click on a URL to visit a web page, or click on the red bars to see more detailed information including which pages you've visited on a domain, or what web sites you visit most frequently at a certain time of day.

[Mozilla Links]

It's trendy to use the latest and greatest URL shortening services in IMs and Twitter postings, but clicking on a TinyURL is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're gonna get. To avoid any nasty surprises, affiliate links, or other deceptive uses of TinyURLs, you can install a Greasemonkey script called TinyURL Decoder.

Although the name of the script contains "TinyURL," that's not the only service it works with. It can decode dozens of different flavors of shortened links. I'm impressed with the huge number of services this plugin includes, from the very popular (the aforementioned TinyURL) to the obscure (PeaUrl). Installing it should leave you well-situated to know where these sometimes-sketchy links are taking you.

When a desktop app does something that needs your attention, you know about it because of system-wide notifications. With web apps, on the other hand, it's easy to miss something that happens when your apps are open in another window or tab. Yip aims to solve that problem by offering a unified web app notification system in Firefox.

Yips is a Firefox port of the notification APIs from Fluid and Prism (the two major ways to turn web apps into desktop apps). With the Yip add-on installed, Firefox will display alerts in your browser window for web app events like an incoming message in the popular multi-chat app, Meebo, or a new reply in the Twitter client Filttr. In fact, Yip will work with practically any site that supports either Fluid or Prism notifications.

If you're a Mac user, you get an added bonus: Yip is compatible with Growl, so you can customize it just like any other set of Growl notifications. With the popularity of web apps continuing to rise, it's somewhat amazing that a unified notification system hasn't been implemented at the browser level. Will we see something like Yip as a standard feature?

Mozilla is preparing to launch a Build Your Own Browser project that will let enterprise customers build custom versions of Firefox for deployment across a corporate network.

The idea is that IT professionals will be able to customize the browser to include custom branding, a preselected group of bookmarks, or other features. Once the custom browser is ready to go, you can create an installer and deploy it on as many computers as necessary.

Theoretically, this could help Firefox make inroads in corporate settings where Internet Explorer is currently the dominant browser because Microsoft provides IT administrators with tools that make it easy to install and control the browser across a corporate network.

The Build Your Own Browser project will launch sometime after Firefox 3.5 is launched this summer.

New Tab Jumpstart isn't the name of some geeky new action movie, although that would be kind of cool. It's the latest in the ongoing development of a decent new tab behavior for Firefox. We've covered several attempts at getting this just right, and New Tab Jumpstart is one of the best so far. It seems largely inspired by the speed dial made popular by Opera and now Google Chrome, but that's not a bad thing.

Chrome users will find the layout of Jumpstart very familiar. The majority of the page is taken up by a grid of frequently-visited sites that you can pin permanently or delete. On the right, there's a search box, a list of recent bookmarks, and a list of recently-closed pages. It's a sensible starting point for a new browser session, although it lacks the eye candy of, for example, Safari's start page.

[via Lifehacker]

Firefox may never catch up to Chrome in the speed tests, but Mozilla has a huge lead when it comes to customization. The newly-announced Jetpack project might well ensure that they stay well ahead of the pack.

Jetpack aims to make browser addons easier to create by allowing developers to do so using only HTML, CSS, and Javascript (newer tags like <canvas> <audio> <video> are also supported, as is AJAX). And of course, Jetpack integrates well with Bespin (video clip after the break), which will make it easy for developers to create addons and roll out future updates.

You can see just how easy writing a Jetpack addon is in Mozilla's tutorial and by taking a quick look at the API reference.

If you add Jetpack to your Firefox install, don't expect perftection. It is, after all, only release 0.1.1. The two demos - GMail checker and UnAd - work just fine, but the position of their statusbar icons needs to be tweaked slightly.

The Firefox community loves their extensions, so making them easier to develop and accessible to a much larger group of developers is an excellent move by Mozilla. The simplicity Jetpack brings should allow for some exciting developments in a very short amount of time.