Surprise, surprise! My sleepy head couldn’t trust my eyes. Mozilla has released the final version of Firefox 5, well ahead of the scheduled date (June 21st). This comes just days after the Firefox 5 RC release and few months after the Firefox 4 release. Unlike FF4, which had numerous beta and RC releases, FF5 ran on a tight schedule with just around 7 betas.
Mind you, Mozilla hasn’t yet made the Firefox 5 release official. It is available on the FTP servers for now, and the official release might happen on June 21st. But that should not stop you from enjoying the stable release of the latest Firefox build, which is more about the improved performance, rather than redesigns.
Update (21st June): Firefox 5 release is official now.
Some of the under-hood changes in Firefox 5 are:
- Support for CSS transitions has been added
- The preference for “Do Not Track” has been moved to aid easier discoverability by users
- Improvements for canvas, JavaScript, and networking performance, and memory usage
- Improved standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL, and canvas
- Improvements to spell checking for various languages
- Improvements to Linux desktop environment integration
- Performance improvements for background tabs
- WebGL fixes: a fix for cross-domain textures and a fix to address the memory stealing issue
Download Firefox 5 Final
You can download Firefox 5 from the Mozilla FTP server. We have made it easier for you with direct download links!
Update: Official Download links
Download Firefox 5 for Windows
Download Firefox 5 for Mac
Download Firefox 5 for Linux
Gone are the days when we used to have just around 1 major release a year. Firefox 6 is already in development with alpha version having been released few days back. It should go into the betas about two weeks following Firefox 5’s release.
[via]WebTrickz