Mozilla Firefox 5 almost out the door

Firefox fans looking for a nice tasty update to their favorite web browser have something to look forward to next week. Mozilla released the Firefox 5 RC (Release Candidate) version of the browser yesterday (this is the step after beta and before the final release), and announced that it has plans to release the final version of the browser next week – assuming no major bugs are found or overhauls need to be done, which is usually the case.
In case you haven’t been keeping up with the Firefox nightly builds/beta, here is a list of features that have been added to the RC version of Firefox 5:

• Added support for CSS animations;
• The Do-Not-Track header preference has been moved to increase discoverability;
• Improved canvas, JavaScript, memory, and networking performance;
• Improved standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL and canvas;
• Improved spell-checking for some locales;
• Improved desktop environment integration for Linux users;
• WebGL content can no longer load cross-domain textures;
• Background tabs have setTimeout and setInterval clamped to 1000ms to improve performance; and
• The Firefox development channel switcher introduced in previous Firefox Beta updates has been removed.

If you thought – it’s only been a few months since the release of Firefox 4; Firefox 6 and 7 is expected to be released by the end of the year as well. It looks like Mozilla is doing a pretty good job of matching Google’s development cycle for its Chrome browser.

George Wong
Categories: Web
Tags: browser, Firefox, Mozilla, release, web