Mozilla Firefox 5

Windows, Mac, Linux and Android: Mozilla has released Firefox 5, the first product of its rapid-release three-month development cycle. Firefox 5's new features include support for CSS animations, do-not-track on Android, and faster canvas graphics. Perhaps the biggest reason to upgrade to Firefox 5, however, is that you can now close multiple tabs more quickly because the tabs stay the same size.

Mozilla has launched Firefox 5 and you can download it now. But don't expect too much: this is the first of the new rapid release cycle builds, so there's not a lot to show for the new major version increment.

The Mozilla Foundation, following in the footsteps of Google’s Chrome Web browser, seems to believe that if they keep popping out new “major” releases every six weeks, they’ll convince people they’re better than the competition. That seemed like a dumb idea to me when Microsoft went from Word for Windows 2.0 to Word for Windows 6.0 back in 1993. The idea hasn’t improved any with age.

Mozilla is starting a more frequent release cycle for the popular web browser, Firefox. The company put this plan into action a few weeks ago when they began working on alpha versions of upcoming software and released it to the new “Aurora” development channel. Five weeks later, Firefox 5.0 beta was born. The release does not bring any new features that the average consumer would recognize or benefit from. Instead, developers get support for the CSS animations standard and access to the new “channel switcher” which allows anyone to switch between using Firefox stable, beta, or Aurora — Mozilla’s fancy term for alpha. And of course, what would a beta release be without bug fixes and performance improvements? Those are also included.