Mozilla delivers Firefox 5 beta

From InfoWorld: Mozilla on Friday shipped the beta of Firefox 5, the latest step in its move to pick up the release pace of its open-source browser.

Firefox 5 is slated to wrap up on June 21.

The company's developers merged the changes made over the last several weeks in Firefox 5's less-polished "Aurora" channel to the beta on May 17, as planned.

It takes Mozilla time -- in the case of Firefox 5's beta, three days -- to run automated quality control tests and prepare distribution mechanisms after merging the code, the company noted earlier this month.

As befits the more frequent release schedule that Mozilla staked out last month, Firefox 5 sports relatively few major changes.

The two that Mozilla called out in a blog post Friday were support for the CSS (cascading style sheets) animation standard -- which has yet to win formal approval from the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards group -- and the inclusion of a "channel switcher" that lets users flip between Firefox's three editions of Aurora, Beta and Release.

Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari already support CSS animations.

Firefox 5 contains many more under-the-hood changes than Mozilla called out, however. The company listed 1,053 stability and other fixes in the detailed release notes accompanying the preview.

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