Firefox 5 Around the Corner: To Be Release Soon

The official release date of Firefox 5 has been set to June 21, which is three days from today. If you do not want to wait until then to play around with the latest stable release of the popular web browser, you can go ahead and download the browser for your language and operating system from the official Mozilla ftp site. As with all releases that appear there, there is a slim chance of last minute bugs that could force Mozilla to pull the release and replace it with another one. If you want to be on the safe side, or want to upgrade or install Firefox 5 in a productive environment, it is better to wait until the official release announcement.

So what’s new in Firefox 5? The release notes list the following new features and changes:

• 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
• The Firefox development channel switcher introduced in previous Firefox Beta updates has been removed

Those are almost exclusively under the hood changes, some may be noticeable on day to day like the improved performance.

It should be noted that Firefox 5 introduces HTTP Transaction sorting by CWND which can improve page loading times considerably. See Firefox 5 Gets Faster Connections, Up Next: Memory Improvements for an in depths review and explanation of that feature.

The do not head tracker preference has been moved to the Privacy tab to get more exposure. Users can activate it to send a “do not track” request to each website they open in Firefox.

Interested users can access the complete list of bugs fixed in Firefox 5 here. Each entry links to Bugzilla where additional information can be found.

The latest version of Firefox 5 can be downloaded from the official Mozilla ftp server. It is likely that most Firefox release mirrors will offer the new version on their servers as well.

Next in line is Firefox 6, which will be released in about three months time.