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Mozilla release Firefox 6 Beta, already?

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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.