There’s been a lot of activity in the web browser market during the year since Mozilla released Firefox 3 — we’ve seen the release of Safari 4 and Internet Exporer 8, and Google has entered the competition with Chrome. Now Mozilla has a new release of its own, Firefox 3.5, with a bunch of new features. The most noticeable changes? One, it’s much faster. But two, it’s missing some key add-ons, which is like a big (if temporary) step back in time.

As someone who does most of his work in Firefox, my biggest complaint has been the occasional slowness and instability, which seemed to increase over the last few months. Mozilla says that using the Sunspider Javascript test, Firefox 3.5 is twice as fast as Firefox 3, and 10 times as fast as Firefox 2. I haven’t given Firefox 3 a thorough test, but in the hour I’ve been using it, I haven’t had to sit and watch my MacBook’s spinning color wheel (indicating that I need to wait as a page loads), and that’s a welcome change.