Firefox 5 beta released: CSS animation, boosted performance, more

By Chris Davies/May 23, 2011 10:51 am EST

Mozilla has pushed out the Firefox 5 beta, freshly fettled after five weeks in the company's bleeding-edge Aurora test channel. The new browser adds in CSS animation support, boosts networking, JavaScript and canvas performance, and polishes the standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL and canvas, among other things.

There's also better spell-checking performance and Linux users should find Firefox 5 integrates better than previous versions. Meanwhile, the much-vaunted Do-Not-Track header system has been moved to a more prominent position, in the hope that more users will take advantage of it.

Interestingly, there's also now easy switching between Mozilla's three channels – Firefox Aurora, Beta and Release – so that users can test out the early versions while not giving up on the most stable release. There's a full list of the changes in Firefox 5 here, and you can download it here.