Firefox Aurora 7 to focus on performance and memory!

The latest developer's build of Firefox launched today, bringing hope to the small but vocal minority of Firefox stable users who have been plagued by the browser's persistent memory and performance problems that Mozilla is not ignoring their complaints. Firefox Aurora 7 can be downloaded for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and includes changes that Mozilla said in a blog post announcing the release will result in 30 percent less memory use "for many users."

Another big memory usage change comes to the "garbage collector" process, which, when working properly, cleans out from your system memory browser processes that are no longer running in active tabs. This, too, is expected to result in better memory management. Telemetry infrastructure has been added to Firefox in this release, so it's easier for Mozilla developers to track how their changes affect the open-source browser. Mozilla also expects people to see faster browser start-up times on all three desktop operating systems.

There are a smattering of new features included in Aurora 7. Most of these relate to support for "future-Web" technologies, and the browser includes support for a Web timing specification to measure performance of a site as it's being used; the hardware acceleration function Azure Direct2D for HTML5 Canvas; and a more elegant way to display text that has spilled out of its boundaries on a page called CSS3 Text-Overflow: ellipsis. In the new version, Firefox Sync will now synchronize bookmarks and passwords by default.

New users will be able to download Aurora 7 immediately (see links above), while existing Aurora users can force an update through Firefox's Help menu or wait for the build to be pushed to them in the next few days!

Source:  http://download.cnet.com

More news:
(softpedia.com) Download-Firefox-7-Aurora-Now-Get-Ready-for-Firefox-6-Beta
(ghacks.net) firefox-7-aurora-shows-significant-memory-usage-improvements
(TechConnect Magazine) Firefox 7 goes aurora, brings memory optimizations, more speed
(techPowerUp!) Mozilla Ready with Firefox 7 Aurora Build
(PC Perspective) New Firefox 7 Aurora Build Promises To Fix Memory Leak Issues
(Legit Reviews) Our Test Shows Firefox 7 Aurora Uses Nearly 40 Percent Less Memory
(TweakTown) Mozilla outs another Firefox build - 7.0 Aurora

Grab official Firefox 5 final ahead of schedule

Official release of Firefox 5.0 from: wikipedia.org
Download official Firefox 5.0 final: (External/Author)

 

The official release date of Firefox 5 has been set to June 21, which is three days from today. If you do not want to wait until then to play around with the latest stable release of the popular web browser, you can go ahead and download it! If you want to be on the safe side, or want to upgrade or install Firefox 5 in a productive environment, it is better to wait until the official release announcement.
So what’s new in Firefox 5? The release notes list the following new features and changes:

• Added support for CSS animations
• The Do-Not-Track header preference has been moved to increase discoverability
• Improved canvas, JavaScript, memory, and networking performance
• Improved standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL, and canvas
• Improved spell checking for some locales
• Improved desktop environment integration for Linux users
• WebGL content can no longer load cross-domain textures
• Background tabs have setTimeout and setInterval clamped to 1000ms to improve performance
• The Firefox development channel switcher introduced in previous Firefox Beta updates has been removed

Those are almost exclusively under the hood changes, some may be noticeable on day to day like the improved performance.
It should be noted that Firefox 5 introduces HTTP Transaction sorting by CWND which can improve page loading times considerably. See Firefox 5 Gets Faster Connections, Up Next: Memory Improvements for an in depths review and explanation of that feature.
The do not head tracker preference has been moved to the Privacy tab to get more exposure. Users can activate it to send a “do not track” request to each website they open in Firefox.

Interested users can access the complete list of bugs fixed in Firefox 5 here. Each entry links to Bugzilla where additional information can be found.