Mozilla are gaining a reputation for very quick updates of their desktop-based web browser Firefox. It was not so long ago that Firefox version 5 was released and they have already released a Firefox 6 Beta.
The Beta covers all major platforms; Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. Can Mozilla really have that many updates to the browser to warrant the release of another version so quickly?
There are a few changes to the browser, the desktop changes are:
- Add-ons Manager with Plugin Check: Check that your plugins are up-to-date directly from the Add-ons Manager
- Improved Panorama Groups: Reduces browser start up time by only loading saved tab groups when you use Panorama
- Improved Address Bar: Highlights the domain name of the website you’re visiting to make it easy to identify where you are online
- Streamlined site identity block
- The Scratchpad: Quickly build and test JavaScript snippets in the browser
- Support for Web Sockets with a prefixed API
- Movable Web Console
- New Web developer-specific menu
- Window.match Media API
- Support for server-sent events
And the changes to the android version:
- New initial experience: Firefox starts faster and uses less memory. Get to your home page quickly and discover browser features on the side panels.
- Higher-quality image scaling: View crisp Web pages and images with less pixelation
- Enhanced Firefox experience on large screen tablets
- Improvements to the form helper on Android
- Fresh visual style on Gingerbread OS
- Optimization for pages that use right to left layout rendering, e.g. in Hebrew and Arabic
- Touch Events for better interaction with Web pages
- IndexedDB allows Web pages to store data offline for faster access
- Automatic text hyphenation
So Mozilla are still handing out the goodies but at a very quick rate! Would it make more sense to hold back some of the changes and release a bigger update every so often, rather than a constant flow of them?
Not that the constant flow of updates is a bad thing, of course. A developer showing full support to a program is obviously much better than little support, however it can be a little hard to keep pace with Mozilla sometimes.