Firefox 5 a new start for Mozilla

The Mozilla Foundation has made good on its promise to speed up the pace of Firefox development and this week released Firefox 5.

But, while the foundation has seemingly successfully switched over to a new “rapid-release” cycle the changes between Firefox 4 and Firefox 5 are relatively small, and at first glance it will be hard for most users to tell the difference.

The interface on Firefox 5 is almost exactly the same as on Firefox 4, but under the hood the foundation has apparently fixed more than 1000 bugs.

Feature wise the major changes include better support for HTML5 and some gains in JavaScript performance.

What is missing is the promised addition of new tabs – including web app tabs – a home tab and a new tab management page. The multiple sign-on manager is also missing.

There are apparently 38 new features including some changes to the do-not-track facility, support for CSS animations (which is a relatively new technology) and better desktop integration for Linux users.

Firefox 5

The Mozilla Foundation is going to have to do some serious selling to convince users that there is good reason to upgrade to the new version. And yet, Firefox 5 is an important release for the foundation which is coming under increasing pressure from competitors such as Google’s Chrome.

It’s also the first release in the foundation’s new rapid release strategy which it hopes will inject some new life into the browser.

Firefox 6 and 7 promise to be significantly more exciting than Firefox 5, if they live up to the hype. These versions will hopefully include the new 2D graphics API called Azure as well as a new, faster, start-up engine.

The latter in particular will please the many users that feel that Firefox start-up has become increasingly sluggish.

Boosting Firefox’s appeal to users is going to become an increasingly important objective for Mozilla which now faces growing competition from Chrome.

According to StatCounter Internet Explorer accounts for 44% of the global browser market, with Firefox in second place at 28%. Google’s Chrome is slowly closing the gap on Firefox and now commands around 20% market share.

The foundation’s rapid release schedule includes releasing Firefox 7 before the end of the year.