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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.
On May 27th, Mozilla updated the Aurora channel with a brand new release of Firefox: version 6.0. That’s right, Firefox 4, 5, and 6 are all available to the public at once, though 4.0 is the only stable version. Firefox 6 is still very early in development, but already includes a number of enhancements. The new Data Management Window gives the user complete control over the access specific websites get to cookies, passwords, location information, and other data stored in the browser. Panorama Groups on Demand improves the experience of Panorama, a feature Mozilla first unveiled in Firefox 4 to easily manage tabs. Groups on Demand decreases start up time by only letting users load saved tab groups when using the Panorama feature. Finally, Plugin Check verifies compatibility of all installed plugins through the Add-ons Manager.
Developers are not left out in Firefox 6 either, as they get some nice tools like Scratchpad to build and test JavaScript right within the browser. There is also additional support for HTML5 and other growing web standards.
Mozilla is internally testing Firefox 7 in the reserved “Nightly” channel. The company plans on releasing completely stable versions of Firefox 5, 6, and 7 by the end of 2011. This new development approach is completely different to their previous release cycle. For instance, Firefox 3.0 was released on June 17, 2008 and it was not until almost three years later that we were finally able to download Firefox 4.0 on March 22, 2011. It seems that Mozilla is following suit with the Google Chrome team, which cranks out a new stable version of the Chrome web browser every six weeks.
Links: Firefox Future Releases blog
Norton frequently warns of high memory usage when I use version 4. I find that the memory usage increases with each url accessed. How do I revert to an older version of firefox? I consider 400 meg usage way over the top.
Switch to Google Chrome. :)
It’s a lot better, trust me.
I’m with Sahas on that. I switched to Chrome a few years ago and never looked back. Besides, reverting to a previous version of Firefox probably is not in your best interest.
Ken, I need to run Firefox for a day with very intensive use before reaching 400 Mbyte. (I’m on 169 Mbyte at the moment.) I don’t think it’s solely the browser taking you to 400—I suspect there must be a plug-in doing that.
Contrary to Sahas and George, I had far greater memory usages on Chrome than I ever did on Firefox.
Great point on the plugin. Another reason why I don’t like Firefox. Chrome extensions are very lightweight.
I would disagree to switching over to Chrome. For chrome, each tab is a seperate process in the process list available in the Task Manager. The problem with this, is that if you have many tabs open at once, Chrome can easily excess the amount of memory usage used by Firefox. Firefox is a great browser imo. I don’t have too much trouble with it.
Ken, you need to check your plug-ins, it sounds like one of them is out of control. As I type this, I’m using Firefox 4 at work with 6 tabs open (three of them Flash-heavy sites required for the job, two of them normal and the final varies since I use it to go to different sites for research.) going on 5 hours straight. Sometimes I have to open a couple of more tabs as well and I’m only at 198 mb right now.That said, Firefox has always been a bit more of a memory hog than its competitors, and that doesn’t seem to have changed too much in 4. I’ve been running 5 at home for a little while, but haven’t paid much attention to its memory usage yet.
Thanks for suggestion about plugin being the memory use cause but … how do I find the separate usage of the plugins, the plugin container only registers 180k?
when scrolling down on-line text with LMB pressed to “mark” or highlight the text preparatory to a copy command, the cursor will not return to the normal ‘arrow symbol’ when LMB is released . firefox enter a ‘non-responding’ state and muse be stopped in task manager.the fault permanent and can be replicated .it works in avnat brwoser ,chrom and opera .
Not useful….. switch older version or chrome
Firefox has launched version 11 few days back and still the speed of it sucks.