Firefox 4? Old News. Get Ready for Firefox 5!

Yes, it’s true. Mozilla may have just launched Firefox 4, but while everyone was downloading it to their heart’s content, Firefox 5 development had already gotten underway. While it may seem a bit silly to be talking about the next version now, the final version is expected to ship during the week of June 29. Nope – that’s not a typo.

For those who’ve been following Mozilla in recent months, the fact that Firefox 5’s launch is right around the corner is of little surprise, since the company laid out plans months ago of its intent to ramp up its versioning scheme. While doing so may be a copycat move of Google’s way of doing things with Chrome, there are potential benefits with accelerating the version numbers.

There’s massive hype that tends to follow Firefox up to a release of a major new version, and as we saw earlier this week, millions upon millions of downloads are streamed to users within the first few days of its launch. It could be that Mozilla would like the Firefox name to keep fresh in people’s minds, and the easiest way to do that is to make a new major version four times a year.

Alright, maybe that’s not Mozilla’s actual reasoning, but it sounds plausable. The more reasonable explanation might be the fact that with a rolling release, updates and new features get rolled out quicker. While each major version with this aggressive rollout wouldn’t unveil a slew of features like one new version every two years would, it would ensure that Firefox users would regularly have the most up-to-date browser possible.

We are not aware of any changes (the roadmap has not been updated yet) in this version compared to Firefox 4.0, other than minor modifications to the JavaScript engine. Firefox 5 will feature a changed user interface, which will not surface until the final phase of the next and first stable development stage experimental.