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Firefox 5 Beta Arrives, Quietly

Mozilla officially activated its beta channel on Friday, providing the first beta version that comes out of its accelerated release cycle. Don’t expect revolutionary changes.


Following a first “fake” beta build (5.0b1) that was posted on May 2, Mozilla has moved the second build (5.0b2) into the public beta channel. This beta channel has existed unofficially for the beta version of Firefox 4 and if you have been using such a beta, you should updated to 5.0 beta automatically.




Firefox 5 Beta is not exactly what many users may have expected. It is mainly a big patch for version 4 that carries additional features under the hood – feature you may not notice at all. According to Mozilla, there is added support for CSS animations (CSS3), the channel switcher (to switch from Aurora to Beta builds), a relocated header within HTML code, performance improvements for Canvas 2D, JavaScript, memory usage (which also received a new monitoring interface at about:memory) as well as networking performance. Also, standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL and canvas has been enhanced.
We aren’t sure if this is the final look for Firefox 5, though. We are still expecting interface improve nets that will include Web App tabs and a new account manager. Mozilla’s roadmap indicated that these features should be available right now – the new release process, however, allows Mozilla to shift features from one version to another much more easily and make them available when they are ready.
I have been using Firefox 5 Beta for three days now and cannot tell the difference to Firefox 4 in every day browsing scenarios. It may be better in canvas support and there may be more HTML5 compatibility, but these features are used so rarely that you won’t notice them, if you aren’t a web developer an you don’t play with HTML5. I am a bit concerned about the limited information Mozilla provides about its developer and beta builds. There needs to be more communication about the ongoing development to spark the kind of enthusiasm Google is building for Chrome.
You can download Firefox 5 Beta   here.

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