Firefox 5 beta ready for release

PanARMENIAN.Net - Although it's only been around for three months, Mozilla doesn't want users to get too comfortable with Firefox 4.

The company has updated the Firefox 5 beta to release candidate status which includes improves support for "future-Web" technology, speeds up the browser, and makes multiple smaller tweaks to the browser, CNET News reports.

Following the path cut by Google with Chrome's rapid-release program, the changes to Firefox 5 are several orders of magnitude smaller than those made in Firefox 4 yet are not insignificant. Most importantly, Firefox 5 release candidate makes multiple under-the-hood tweaks to improve performance. Memory management, JavaScript rendering, canvas, and networking performance have been enhanced, and background tabs will load faster thanks to locking down the setTimeout and set Interval timeouts to 1000 milliseconds. Standards support has also been updated for coding languages like HTML5, SMIL, and MathML, and the browser now supports CSS animations.

In a minor interface change, Mozilla's Do Not Track header preference in an effort by the company to make it easier for users to find. Do Not Track is an effort spearheaded by multiple browser makers to get advertisers to respect the desire of users who don't want ads to track them as they browse around the Internet. It works by adding a line to a Web site's meta tags.

Also, the development channel switcher that had been introduced to the About Firefox window has been removed. This was because Mozilla discovered that most of the people using the beta and Aurora channels were running multiple installs of the browser concurrently, said Johnathan Nightingale, the director of Firefox development, in a blog post.