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Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5, after the recently releases of Safari 4, and Internet Explorer 8, the third major browser release this year. With Opera 10 in beta, we should almost certainly see all four major browsers significantly upgraded in 2009.

For developers, like Safari 4, Firefox 3.5 is a big step forward, with considerable support for CSS 3 and HTML 5, and other emerging standards. Some of the most important features from our perspective as developers include

• font linking with CSS @font-face rules
• text-shadows and box-shadows with CSS
• support for most CSS 3 selectors
• CSS Transforms
• CSS 3 Media Queries
• client side storage for web applications
• “threaded” JavaScript with web workers
• Geolocation support – your web sites can ask Firefox where the user is with a simple DOM API.

And a great deal more. Full details at Mozilla Developer Center.

I have a feeling this will be one of those milestone browser launches, akin to Internet Explorer 5 for the Mac. Where IE5 for the Mac showcased the true capabilities of CSS for web design and development, Firefox 3.5 may well be one day considered the first browser release to really show case what web applications are capable of.