Firefox 5 beta lands right on schedule
Last Friday Mozilla kept to its promise and shipped the first beta of Firefox 5.
Here's a 'what's new' listing:
- Added support for CSS animations
- Added support for switching Firefox development channels
- 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
Note: Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari browser both support CSS animations.
There are also a whopping number of bug and stability fixes, detailed here.
Contrary to some report that say that the Firefox 5 user interface is identical to that of Firefox 4, there are, in fact, some small changes. Mozilla's Director of Community Development Asa Dotzler details a few changes:
The overall effect might seem subtle but after using it for a while and then going back to Firefox 4, you can really "feel" the difference.
Full release notes here. If you're thinking of running this beta, I suggest you check out the known issues list first.
Final release of Firefox 5 is schedule for June 21.