Firefox 3 Beta 5 released, RC1 Freezes April 8

As it races to the goal post, Mozilla.org announced that beta 5 of Firefox 3 is available and that the code for release candidate 1 will be frozen on April 8.

Beta 5 offers big improvements over previous release including enhanced stability, performance and  web compatibility and user interface enhancements, including changes to the look-and-feel of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OSX and Linux themes.

The updated beta also offers enhanced integration with Windows, Mac and Linux, including improved Windows icons and native user interface widgets , as well as a more native Mac OSX look and feel with support for OSX widgets, a combined back and forth button and growl notifications support. On the Linux side, Firefox default icons and menus use the native GTK themse.

In personalization capabilities, the Place organizer allows users to view, organize and search all bookmarks, tags and browing history with multiple views and smart folders to store frequent searches, and create restore and backups at will.

In terms of peformance, the enhanced JavaScript engine and profile guided optimizations have yielded significant performance improvements. Mozilla.org claimed that applications such as Google mail and Zoho Office run twice as fats on Firefox 3 beta 5 as compared to Firefox 2 .

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