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After five weeks of testing on the Firefox Aurora channel, Firefox 5 has graduated to the beta channel. Maybe more important is the fact that this release shipped on time, which bodes well for Mozilla's planned June 21 launch date for the final version. And while there aren't a ton of changes in Firefox 5, Mozilla's mechanics rooted out 1,053 bugs under the hood for what's hopefully a smoother ride.
Other than bug fixes, Firefox beta 5 introduces the following changes:
For a longer -- much longer -- and more detailed list of what's new in Firefox 5, oil up your mouse's scroll wheel and run through the complete list of changes here.
Comments are closed on this article
whathuhitwasntme
May 23, 2011 at 3:36pm
wtf
how about you get the last one rite before you release the next one?
fire fox 4 is still buggy as all hell! The yager java crap does not work steady at all. I will NOT REINSTALL ALL MY OTHER SOFTWARE SO YOURS CAN WORK RITE! every other browser out there manages just fine to run on my system, but firefox 4 chokes.
so we just jump to the next version never fixing the last one. And here I thought we were trying to be better than microsoft, nope. JUST LIKE THEM!
Scatter
May 24, 2011 at 5:58am
Read the article, it's not that long. PAy special attention to the following quote;
"And while there aren't a ton of changes in Firefox 5, Mozilla's mechanics rooted out 1,053 bugs under the hood for what's hopefully a smoother ride."
Happy now?
bloodgain
May 23, 2011 at 9:36am
I concur with Dysthimia. Software developers have changed the way they version their releases, and it's misleading. Now, other groups are changing their version numbers faster so they don't look like they are falling behind. If there isn't a major functionality or interface change, it should just be a sub-version release. In some cases, they're releasing new "versions" for what should just be a dot-drop (i.e. 4.0.1), all because they haven't had a new version in 6 months.
This is one of the negative effects of the agile programming movement. Because software teams are encouraged to go through the development steps more quickly (over smaller parts), they have taken that as a queue that they should be versioning faster.
Dysthymia
May 23, 2011 at 7:43am
Virtually nothing but bug fixes? Shouldn't it be 4.1 then? Before you know it we're gonna be on Firefox 37.
Dartht33bagger
May 23, 2011 at 3:42pm
Exactly. I think this new trend in the browser market is stupid. The way Firefox used to do it was the right way - make a browser last for 3 years and then move it up again. Having Firefox 5 come out already is just stupid. I don't want to have Firefox 37 in a couple of years.
We shouldn't be seeing Firefox 5 until 2013 or 2014 IMO.
