The much awaited Firefox 3.5 which comes with significant upgrades will launch on June 30. It features a faster rendering engine, stability enhancements and a new JavaScript engine that boosts the performance of most web-based applications. Mozilla had announced that they’d launch Firefox 3.5 by the end of the June.

Firefox 3.5 is a major Firefox update and some of the major advancements in this version are:

• Support for the <video> and <audio> tags as defined in the HTML 5 specification
• XHR for powerful web applications
• Tab tearing
• Private browsing mode
• Tracemonkey Javascript Engine

Th beta users of Firefox 3.5 RC are already aware with all these features.

Just in case if there are folks who don’t about Launchy then let me inform that it’s a smart application which lets you open applications in your Windows Operating Systems. It is an application launcher and you just need to punch in the name of the application you want to run.

Sitelauncher is a website launcher for Firefox which would help you do more in less time. Sitelauncher lets users open their favorite websites in super-quick way using your keyboard. This Firefox extension is particularly useful if you visit certain sites routinely.

Sitelauncher lets you create a hotkey for each website and if you don’t wanna remember an alphabet for a each site then the default mode shows you all the sites that you currently have configured under it. It will show you a screen after punching in the default hotkey just like the one pictured above.

If you are surviving on a slow internet connection then you can probably empathize with the situation when you let a video buffer for minutes before you can watch it. You can bear buffering if the video is worth it and if it isn’t then you have just wasted some crucial minutes of your life watching a junk video.

Videosurf can probably help you in this regard as it shows you the videos at a glance through the screenshots at specific regular intervals. Videosurf is a video directory where it has added links of many videos across many popular video hostng sites like Youtube, Metacafe, DailyMotion and CollegeHumor.

Videosurf can help people who can’t bear too much suspense in a video. A firefox extension of Vodeosurf has also been launched which lets you see a breakdown of the most important scenes from the video you’re about to watch, and even skip to a particular moment, all without having to click “play.”

This is what I call clever integration.

Yammer, the Twitter for businesses has got its first serious Firefox extension which would now allow corporate tweeple to stay connected with every tweet on their office network. The firefox extension is called Yammerfox and it resembles a lot with Twitterfox. On a closer inspection you would know that the Twitterfox extension has almost been copied to make Yammerfox just like Yammer was copied out of Twitter.

Yammer won the TechCrunch 50 award some time back while it was also criticized for just copying the twitter for workplace. In spite of all the criticism and the herd of tjousands of twitter based and twitter like services, it has definitely managed to create its own niche notably because of the senseless PR by Michael Arrington.

If you are one of those guys who tend to spend more time on their iGoogle page and less on Gmail then you might be interested in installing this Firefox add-on called iGoogle Tab Remover. This Firefox extension basically removes the iGoogle left navigation tab.

It should be helpful to the iGoogle users who have small computer screens. iGoogle navigation tab does cover up lot of screen which can otherwise be utilized by the Google gadgets in the iGoogle dashboard.

iGoogle although started out well but it’s biggedt competition seems to be the Google’s own Gmail as they have now started GMail labs which you can activate from the Settings in your Gmail account.

It seems that Firefox is not really ready to forgive Google for launching Google Chrome and now comes this development that Firefox has dumped Google Search for Yandex Search in Russia. In the next Firefox update Mozilla is going to make Yandex as the default search provider for all the Russian versions of Firefox. Russia has always been a tough market to crack for Google and this particular event is bound to worsen things for Google in lucrative Russian market.

The search market in Russia is dominated by players like Yandex and Rambler and Google has the market share of around 25% which is quite in contrast to its monopoly in majority of the serach engine markets worldwide.

If we talk about the advertising revenues then Yandex controls the 50% market while Rambler is close second with 41% and other players including Google are fighting over the remaining nine percent. The people who were already using Google will eventually change their search provider to it but it will only cause some impact with new web users who are not that tech-savvy to even change their default search engine on Firefox. Google had also initiated advertising to woo Russians which apparently didn’t helped. Certainly not a good year for Google in Russia. Do Svidania Google.

Mario Bros. fans, rejoice! because there is a new Firefox theme made especially for you. The theme is called Mushroom Kingdom and it is an experimental add0on as of now which means you’d need to have an account at Firefox Add-ons in order to download and install it.

Firefox recently managed to garner more than 20% web browser market share and this is by all means a great news for the best browser in the world. Just to make things more interesting and appealing to general web users it has started what they are calling “Fashion Your Firefox.”

Fashion your Firefox is merely a set of add-ons for the various type of web users. Most web users just want to do simple browsing and their priority is to get what they seek faster while there are also others who likes to use it for social media activity. Firefox is basically trying to target such niche users by providing them with certain extensions which can help them in their browsing.

It has categorized web users into nine categories like “Finder and Seeker,” “Social Butterfly,” “News Junkie” and “Digital Pack Rat” etc. Firefox is not just trying to promote it amongst the mortals who are still running on Internet Explorer buy they also intemnd to popularize the download of Firefox 3. Firefox is going to soon end support for Firefox 2 and they want users to move completely to the latest version.

These add-on packs are definitely great but they won’t amuse an advanced Firefox user.

Firefox 3.1 is not very far from its launch date and now we have a better idea about the features we shall see in it. Firefox has launched 3.1 beta which has glimpse of the possible features that Firefox 3.1 will have.

It is confirmed that Firefox 3.1 will have faster performance as it employs faster TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. The most anticipated feature however is the Private mode which was not seen in the beta version. It will also come with a native audio and video support which will allow users to watch videos of ogg file type.

There will be a inbuilt support for geolocation in the 3.1 which can otherwise be activated by a Firefox extension called Geode. This extension helps in bringing you better and more localized search results.

Firefox 3 will have improvement patches as well as some cosmetic changes. There will be a new tab-switching shortcut that shows previews of the tab you’re switching to. This tab changing feature was earlier supported with the help of an add-on but Firefox community members decided to include it in Firefox 3.1.

Firefox has today however also announced the launch of a new tab feature called tab tearing which will allow you to drag a tab out of its current window, and it is removed and opened on a new one.

Internet is full of information and then there is multiple times of junk over here as well. Firefox allows you to make certain customizations which help retrieve the information you seek with being annoyed by the distractions like ads or flash videos. Some of the popular Firefox extensions which let you concentrate on the important information are:

AdBlock Plus: This extension is an advertiser’s and publishers nightmare come true. It allows readers to block ads altogether leaving you with just the content you need. I mentioned AdBlock Plus and not AdBlock because it is more advanced in tracking ads and thus is more potent.

Flashblock works on same lines as well. It block those annoying flash videos from starting once you open a webpage which has flash content. Youtube videos won’t start on its own after installing this add-on.

BlockSite can solve help you if you want to block certain websites. This extension goes a step beyond in blocking the hyperlinks of those websites too. It can not be used for parental control though because it is not password protected.

GMail Ad Blocker: Firefox extensions like AdBlock Plus can’t really block the contextual ads in Gmail. This extension can let you do that.

ProCon Latte is a filter which can block content of any type you put in blacklist. You can block websites of gambling or porn by using this extension. It can be used for parental control because of password protection support.