Firefox 5 - Now available for download

Wednesday June 22, 2011 , 2 min Read

Firefox created furore among netizens when it introduced tabbed browsing way back in September 2002. Ever since, they didn’t look back. Firefox has been enhancing browser capabilities, version after version. It has just been 3 months since Firefox 4 was released, they are back again with Firefox 5 for desktop and Android services even. The release is quite surprising as Mozilla took 2 years to update from Firefox 3.5 to Firefox 4. Firefox 5 is part of Mozilla’s new rapid release development cycle. This cycle resembles Google’s chrome browser in terms of behavior as it is faster and can produce iterative updates. That is not over yet! Mozilla is set to launch version 7 anyhow by this year end.There is not much difference when it comes to visual features from Firefox 4 and 5.Things were not done from scratch and the effort was surely not to create a new browser, rather to enhance it. There has been significant changes in support services for web standards, fixed a few bugs, enhanced performance of the browser.

Here are some of the major features brought in Firefox 5:

Support for CSS animations.
Better visibility for the Do-Not-Track header preference.
Improved canvas and JavaScript support.
Better standards support for canvas, HTML5, XHR, MathML and SMIL.
Better tuned HTTP idle connection logic.

Another resemblance found with Chrome is that, Mozilla introduced additional options for users who are interested to participate in beta and testing process. Other than the usual nightly and beta releases, users get a chance to try the Aurora channel, which gives them the rare chance to try out different features even before a beta version gets released. Firefox 5 is said to be quicker than Firefox 4. The new features are exciting and increase the speed while accessing the web.

Here is how you update it: