Mozilla is moving ahead with the development of Firefox 3.0 toward the official release date planned for June 2008. The last evolution of the browser took it from Beta 4 to Beta 5, and in this manner marked the 13th developer milestone of the product, taking into consideration both the Alpha and the Beta stages. Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 went live on April 2, 2008, and is available for download here; and even though Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer stated that Firefox 3.0 was ready for prime time as of Beta 4, Beta 5 is still labeled as a developer preview designed for "testing purposes only."

According to Mozilla, Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 brings to the table not only new features but also consistent enhancements in terms of performance, memory usage and speed. "Firefox 3 Beta 5 includes more than 750 changes from the previous beta, improving stability and web compatibility, providing platform and user interface enhancements, and resulting in the fastest Firefox ever. Many of these improvements were based on community feedback from the previous beta," Mozilla revealed.

But even with the enhancements introduced in Firefox 3.0 Beta 5, Mozilla does not yet pass the Acid3 web standards test introduced in early March, ahead of Beta 4. Opera has managed to outperform both Firefox 3.0 and Internet Explorer 8 in this area. Microsoft released IE8 Beta 1 at the start of March and is planning to drop the second Beta by the summer of 2008. By that time Mozilla should have wrapped it up with the development of Firefox 3.0.

"New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include improvements to the user interface based on user feedback, including changes to the look and feel on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux. Changes and fixes for new features such as the location bar autocomplete, bookmark backup and restore, full page zoom, and others, based on feedback from our community. Fixes and improvements to platform features to improve security, web compatibility and stability. Continued performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization continues to improve performance over previous releases as measured by the popular SunSpider test from Apple, and in the speed of web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office," Mozilla revealed.

Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 for Linux is here.
Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 for Mac OS X is here.