Almost three months following Firefox 4’s release, Mozilla has posted final builds for Firefox 5 ahead of the official release date of June 21. The new accelerated release schedule Mozilla is using for Firefox development will see the next version of Firefox, Firefox 6, go into beta about two weeks following Firefox 5’s release.
The new release looks and runs very similar to Firefox 4, but it has a few changes under the hood. The official changelog will be made available here.
- 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 links are available below:
- Windows (32-bit)
Mozilla has only rolled the browser out to one handset so far — Nokia’s Maemo-based N900, pictured here running the application — but it plans to create versions for the Android and Windows Mobile platforms.