Mozilla Firefox 5 is Now Available – First Rapid Release

Jun 21st, 20112 Comments

FirefoxMozilla has just released Firefox 5.0 earlier today, the first version as part of their plan for a rapid three month release cycle. Unlike past Firefox releases however, this one does not contain a ton of features and the release does not come with a big celebration.

After experiencing several delays with the release of Firefox 4 and noticing how successful Chrome became with their release cycle, Mozilla decided to move to a rapid lease cycle with finalized versions coming every three months. Firefox 5 came exactly three months later, right on schedule.

New features of Firefox 5 include:

  • Support for CSS animations.
  • Faster 2D canvas graphics as well as memory and Javascript performance.
  • Do-not-track preferences moved to the Privacy tab for better visibility.
  • The Android version now supports do-not-track and panning performance is improved.

As you can see, this is quite a minor release with very few new features, similar to Chrome releases. Mostly performance and bug fixes.

Personally, I think they should have made the version number 4.1. Users who aren’t aware of their new cycle would be quite confused and x.x was considered a semi-major release in the past.

What do you think of Firefox 5 and their new release cycle? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Firefox 5.0 Release Notes

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Brian is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of TechAirlines. He is also a developer and manages most of the site’s operations. He enjoys web development in his free time and is currently trying to learn Python. He is currently a high school senior in New York City.

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  • mao_dze_dun

    Well I might have trolled on your Gimp – Paint.Net article but this one is spot on ;). When my FF updated to version 5 a few days ago I was like “huh?!?!” :))). I think they should do something about the huge memory hunger of Firefox – Chrome is way lighter. Also am I the only one who thinks that the new (version 4 onward) default interface of FF is a complete rip-off IE9/Opera?

    • http://www.techairlines.com Brian Yang

      A agree about the memory issue, although Chrome does tend to use more memory if you have a lot of tabs/extensions. The memory issue with Firefox certainly has improved with each release since with the same number of extensions, my Firefox used to use 600 MB or higher (sometimes well over a gigabyte) but now it seems to stabilize at 300 MB.

      All browsers are influenced by others’ good ideas. I believe top tabs were started by Opera, and Chrome extended that by removing the title bar. Other browsers followed that by moving the tabs to the top and eliminating the title bar. The Firefox menu button does look a lot like the Opera button, which came first. Soon, all major browsers will look very much like each other.

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