Firefox 3.5 has been released. Not everybody is excited about this release, but most reviews are quite positive. In my opinion, the enhanced javascript performance is the most important improvement, but features like the html 5 video and audio tags, offline support, @font-face, geolocation support and cross site XHR are not to be underestimated.
As far as i’m concerned, Firefox 3.5 marks the moment when Microsofts fears have materialized: modern browsers are now really an alternative to desktop applications. No longer are they just for rendering pages (or slightly enhanced by some ajax scripting), but the complete view layer can be implemented using open browser technology. The server is no longer needed for the view layer. We’re back into client-server architecture. Some interesting examples that are enabled by modern browsers illustrate this: offline html5 gmail application for the iphone and Google Wave.