Mozilla pushes out final Firefox 5 test build

Silence of the browser lambs

By Team Register • Get more from this author

Posted in Applications, 16th June 2011 12:03 GMT

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Mozilla plans to release the next small-fry iteration of its Firefox browser next week.

Ahead of that, a release candidate version of Firefox 5 landed yesterday. The open-source browser-maker lists the following tweaks to the latest test build:

Added support for CSS animations;
The Do-Not-Track header preference has been moved to increase discoverability;
Improved canvas, JavaScript, memory, and networking performance;
Improved standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL and canvas;
Improved spell-checking for some locales;
Improved desktop environment integration for Linux users;
WebGL content can no longer load cross-domain textures;
Background tabs have setTimeout and setInterval clamped to 1000ms to improve performance; and
The Firefox development channel switcher introduced in previous Firefox Beta updates has been removed.

Firefox 4 was released just three months ago, and versions 6 and 7 of the popular browser are expected before the year is out.

Mozilla recently rejigged its release schedule, in part to reflect Google's Chrome development cycle.

Big browser releases are now a thing of the past at Mozilla Towers. The org now prefers to iterate often with smaller changes between each new version. ®

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