Firefox 5 Should have been Firefox 4.02!

• Tweet

• Tweet

Mozilla has officially released Firefox 5, only 3 months after the releases of Firefox 4 following the rapid release strategy of Google Chrome. The idea behind is to bring about changes in the browser as soon as possible and keep the browser up-to-date by creating different development channels. But we see that there are no significant changes in the browser, design or any dramatic improvement. This poses a question, whether or not, Firefox 5 should have been Firefox 4.1.0 or Firefox4.0.2?


As we have already reviewed in the last post that there are some tweaks under the hood and no significant changes in the UI and design. The major (yet under-the-hood) improvements in the new browser include:

1- Do Not Track Feature: This feature will improve privacy of the browser. The feature is now easily accessible via Privacy Menu (than hidden under Advanced Options) 2- Added security to WebGL: After Microsoft’s blunt allegation that WebGL is a severity threat to web-severity; Mozilla’s security enhancement is definitely a good enhancement.

3- Support for CSS Animations & improved standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL, and canvas

4- Firefox 5 on Android devices has a better page-load-speed and will load webpages in shorter time particularly on 3G networks. The IP version 6 support is also included. What about the speed? Apparently the memory issues with Firefox 4 have been resolved and the new browser version is small and quicker! Nevertheless, some speed and performance test undertaken by experts around the web, show that the browser is lagging behind Google Chrome and even IE 9. There are certainly no notable changes, like the ones witnessed by the users when upgrading from Firefox 3 to Firefox 4. For most of us, no enhancement in the UI means no significant improvement: and unfortunately Firefox 5 does not have any! Additionally the new browser won’t support most of your add-ons too. Users earlier too had been confronted to this situation when upgrading from FF V3 to FF V4: where their favorite add-ons were not supported in the new browser. In our post “7 Firefox Add ons for improvement of security”; we investigated that even some top-rated add-ons were not supported for Firefox 4, bunch of weeks after FF4 debuted, even though FF 4 was a major release. Now just 3 months after the issue, FF users are again facing the same annoyance! Though Firefox 5 has some encouraging improvements yet, in my view, FF 5 does not have the right to be called FF5 and should have been FF 4.02! What do you think?

{module user9-footer}

Related posts:

1. Firefox 3.6.6 is available!
2. Firefox overtakes Internet Explorer in Europe in browser wars
3. Firefox adding numbers to catchup Chrome 9 & Opera11!
4. IE, Chrome or Firefox; who wins the race?
5. Firefox 3.0.9 targets 12 security vulnerabilities