Geek-O-Rama: Firefox 5 Release

Firefox 5 is out this week, and if you've been using FF 4 like I have for some time now, you're not going to notice much of a difference from the most recent version of 4 at all.  There are some nice improvements however as Mozilla cranks up the dev cycle war against Google and its Chrome browser.

Given the faster release schedule for Firefox, we didn’t expect the number of new significant features would match the number unveiled when Firefox 3.6 upgraded to Firefox 4.0, and this proved to be the case.

Apart from more than 1,000 bug fixes, Mozilla has added support for Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) animations (another method of animating web content besides using JavaScript) and moved the do-not-track header preference to make it easier to find. Do-not-track is a privacy feature giving better control over online behavioural tracking.

Mozilla also says there is improved canvas, JavaScript memory and networking performance. Canvas is part of the HTML5 standard giving users the ability to script rendering of bitmaps and 2D shapes dynamically.

We did register the increase in JavaScript performance, and we also checked the claimed memory performance which did show Firefox 5 using less memory and threads to operate.

On the security front, Mozilla has stopped WebGL content from loading cross-domain textures because it is a security risk – if a user was viewing secure content in one tab and there were other website tabs open, scripts loaded in the other tabs from other websites might be able to read information in the secure tab.

That's the good news.  The bad news?  FF is still badly lagging behind Chrome 12, Opera 11 and IE 9 as far as Javascript speed is concerned, and it's still very, very noticeable.  (Still beats the pants off of Safari, eww).

I still prefer FF, but I find Chrome and IE9 are importing many of the features I like about the Mozilla browser and with better stability (Chrome especially).  Mozilla has its work cut out for it down the road, but FF 6 and even FF 7 are scheduled to be out before the end of the year.  We'll see.