Mozilla has posted the first official beta release of Firefox 5, its next browser upgrade. Changes from Mozilla’s experimental Aurora channel were merged and tested over the weekend. The update marks a switch to an accelerated development schedule, closer to that of Google’s Chrome, which has a major update every several weeks and is already in its 11th stable version and 12th beta.
Like Chrome, the faster pace will mean fewer major upgrades with each new version. Firefox 5, for instance, will get support for CSS animations already present in both Chrome and Safari, and a “channel switcher” that lets people jump between the Aurora, Beta and Release tracks of Firefox. Some 1,053 fixes have been made under the hood.
The completed Firefox 5 update should arrive in late June. Firefox 6 is already scheduled to arrive on August 9th. If Mozilla holds to schedule, each subsequent update will launch every six weeks, meaning that Firefox 8 or 9 could be ready by the end of the year.
