Mozilla is trying to establish a new 6-week product cycle for its Firefox web browser and has just posted the first build of Firefox 5, not quite six weeks after the release of Firefox 4, which crossed the 10% market share mark over the weekend.
It feels as if Firefox 4 was just released, at least if you did not crawl along the seemingly never ending beta process of the browser last year. The next version is already knocking on your door and due for a first beta release on May 17. The first build has made its way out of the Aurora channel and was promoted from version 5.0a2 to 5.0 beta (build1).
It is pretty clear that Mozilla is still trying to find its way with its new release channels (Nightly, Aurora, Beta, Final) and is not finding enough support for its new strategy. According to a recent developer meeting, Aurora was targeted to attract between 1 and 4 million users, but isn’t even at 100,000 yet. There are plenty of problems that need to be addressed, including plug-in compatibility, lack of documentation and a relatively complex process to get multiple versions of Firefox to run side-by-side. It’s just not very convenient to beta-test Firefox and there seem to be communications problems as well: Mozilla itself advertises Aurora, for example, not something for the “faint of heart” (which may not be the best way to attract users), but some Mozilla bloggers call it “now safe” to be used.
You can download the Firefox 5 beta from Mozilla’s FTP server. However, you could be disappointed as there are no visible differences to Firefox 4. There are some fine-tuned Panorama feature, but the overall appearance is the same. According to Mozilla, there is new CSS3 support and tab management functionality. However, I have not been able to identify what has changed in Firefox tab management. What I did notice is a slight improvement in HTML5 support, which is up from 255 to 264 points in HTML5test.com.
Firefox 4 is still gaining market share, but most likely not as fast as Mozilla would have hoped. StatCounter listed Firefox 4 with a market share of more than 10% over the weekend and just under 10% (9.88%) for today (Firefox’ market share tends to be higher on weekends). Mozilla currently indicates that about 128.5 million copies of Firefox 4 have been downloaded since the browser’s launch on March 22. IE9 is still trailing Firefox 4 and is estimated at 3.39% share today. It briefly eclipsed the market share of IE6 over the weekend with 3.83%, but has fallen behind today again. IE6 is listed with 4.77% today.
Google is showing a flawless version transition again. Chrome 11, launched on April 27, has already captured 9.42% of the browsing share, while version 10 is at 7.29% (down from 16.04% on April 27).
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