Firefox 5 Released

Posted on: June 29th, 2011

Firefox 5 got released recently. Even though it is a big jump in the version numbering it seems to be a minor release that fixes the main bugs. In fact, Firefox 4 automatically updates to version 5 which is usually not the case with major releases.

The new version seems to work better. I updated to it from my Firefox 3.6 which I had to keep because Firefox 4 wasn’t working right with Google Docs (at least on my machine). But FF 5 works fine and it’s faster too

Yesterday, I also saw that the companion project, Thunderbird, got a new version: 5.0 . I think Mozilla just switched to a new numbering with this release and got everything on the same page.

I’ve been using FF 5 since it came out and didn’t run into any kind of problems. So this time I can recommend it without reservations.

You can upgrade to FF 5 from versions prior to 4.0 but be prepared that the user interface will look different! Your usual menu bar might disappear and gets replaced by an orange “Firefox” button. From that, you can actually turn it back on but I found the Firefox button better organized for accessing the most frequently needed item and this arrangement saves space on the screen.

One thing that was hard to find after the upgrade is the Back Button history (you know when you want to jump back not one but more pages). There’s no separate button for that but you need to right click (or left-click and hold) on the back button to bring that menu up. Easy enough to use just it’s not easy enough to find.

Other than this, I’m very happy with it.

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