Firefox 5 final version released after three months wait

The Mozilla Foundation has officially released version 5.0 of their Firefox web browser.

It’s now official - Firefox 5 is available for download. This release comes barely three months after the release of Firefox 4. This is an initial victory for the Mozilla Foundation who has managed to maintain their new quick development cycle calendar.

We no longer need to wait for long periods between major engine updates. For Firefox 5, the end user also won’t find any major interface changes compared to Firefox 4. Except Do Not Track which is to activated in the privacy tab (it should be noted that this function is available in the mobile version).

Other refinements have also been implemented, for example, more time has been added before the tabs are dimensioned after being closed, various mouse cursors are available, and changes have been made in Panorama. This is only visible when numerous tabs are open at the same time.

It is mainly under the hood where improvements are notable though. Mozilla has improved the way in which Firefox manipulates idle connections and establishes data transmission between the server and browser. This should improve the load times of pages.

We have also previously indicated some of the other changes, including:

• Support of CSS animations
• Improved performance: JavaScript, memory management, network
• Better support of HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL, Canvas
• Improved integration of the desktop environment for Linux  users
• Faster loading of tabs in the background

By adding various stability corrections, we realise though that the major engine updates in Firefox now provide you with "less" than before, although under the hood things are still moving in the right direction.

The Mozilla Foundation is nevertheless taking a risk as the end user who may be used to less frequent updates may now be disappointed to find fewer new features than before with each new release. It’s not because Google Chrome does this that it should be done with Firefox.

We will have to see with the next releases. The Mozilla Foundation will surely hold back some leading functions to make these visible with Firefox 6 and 7 planned for release this year.

Download Firefox 5 ( Windows, Mac OS X, Linux )