Wow, that was fast, right? It was only 90 days ago that Mozilla debuted Firefox 4 and those nuts have already gone ahead and jumped forward another full version number. So what’s changed in those three months? Mostly some under the hood stuff, so read on.
Mozilla announced the availability of Firefox 5 on Tuesday, which was likely lost on many Mac users who were busy downloading Apple’s new Final Cut Pro X and companion apps Motion 5 and Compressor 4. While Firefox 5 isn’t as radical a change as Firefox 4 was when it was released all of three months ago, the new version gains a lot of improvements where it counts, which is under the hood.
Among the Firefox 5 new features are support for CSS animations, a new place for the Do-Not-Track header preference “to increase discoverability” (i.e., nobody could find it before, apparently) and “tuned HTTP idle connection logic for increased performance.”
But that’s not all -- heavens, no! Firefox 5 makes a ton of improvements across the board, with canvas, JavaScript, memory and networking performance, improved standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL and canvas, improved spell checking “for some locales” and Linux users get a bonus with improved desktop environment integration.
We know, none of that seems to warrant a full version number release in such a short time, but those kooky kids at Mozilla are really stepping up their game and plan to keep pumping out the updates at a rapid clip. Somebody’s got to keep up with Google Chrome, right?
Head over to the Mozilla website and download Firefox 5 today -- if you haven’t installed Firefox 4 yet, it will be like a whole new experience for you.
Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter
jrbookwalter
June 23, 2011 at 5:20am
Actually, 1Password was updated for Firefox 5 the day before release! The only add-ons that FF5 broke for me were the Adobe CS5.5 ones which I don't really use anyway, otherwise it's been smooth sailing, at least for me.
bproffit
June 22, 2011 at 4:40pm
Before you rush people to install the new version, you should caution them that a great many add-ons and extensions aren't yet compatible with Firefox 5 so they may well lose a lot of the extra goodies they like. As much as I hope the new version will solve some of the instability Firefox 4 brought, I can't go back to the dark ages and of life without things like 1Password.
ilikeimac
June 22, 2011 at 1:52pm
Seriously!? I just installed Firefox 4 on Monday. Of course that's partly because I barely ever use Firefox.
