Firefox was created by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross as an experimental branch of the Mozilla browser, first released as Firefox 1.0 on November 9, 2004.Thunderbird versions prior to 91.3.0 are vulnerable to the heap overflow described in CVE-2021-43527 when processing S/MIME messages. Starting with version 5.0, a rapid release cycle was put into effect, resulting in a new major version release every six weeks. Main article: Firefox early version history Rapid releases This was gradually accelerated further in late 2019, so that new major releases occur on four-week cycles starting in 2020. In April 2011, the development process was split into several "channels", each working on a build in a different stage of development. The most recent available build is called "Nightly Builds" and offers the latest, untested features and updates. The "Aurora" build is up to six weeks behind "Nightly" and offers functionality that has undergone basic testing. As of version 35, the "Aurora" channel has been renamed to the "Developer Edition" channel. The "Beta" channel is up to six weeks behind the "Aurora" build, for up to about twelve weeks compared to the most recent "Nightly" build. The "Beta" channel provides improved stability over the "Nightly" builds and is the first development milestone that has the "Firefox" logo. "Release" is the current official version of Firefox. Gecko version numbering is the same as the Firefox build version number, starting with 5.0 on Firefox 5. The stated aim of this faster-paced process is to get new features to users faster. This accelerated release cycle was met with criticism by users, as it often broke add-on compatibility, as well as those who believe Firefox was simply trying to increase its version number to compare with other browsers such as Google Chrome. Firefox 5 through 9įirefox 5 was released on June 21, 2011, three months after the major release of Firefox 4. Firefox 5 is the first release in Mozilla's new rapid release plan, matching Google Chrome's rapid release schedule and rapid version number increments. Firefox 5 has significantly improved the speed of web-related tasks, such as loading pages with combo boxes or MathML. Mozilla also integrated the HTML5 video WebM standard into the browser, allowing playback of WebM videos. įirefox 6 was released on August 16, 2011, introducing a permissions manager, new address bar highlighting (the domain name is black while the rest of the URL is gray ), streamlining the look of the site identity block, a quicker startup time, a ScratchPad JavaScript compiler, and many other new features. This update also brought the infamous feature that caused JavaScript entered in the address bar to not run. įirefox 7 was released on September 27, 2011, and uses as much as 50% less RAM than Firefox 4 as a result of the MemShrink project to reduce Firefox memory usage. įirefox 7.0.1 was released a few days later, fixing a rare, but serious, issue with add-ons not being detected by the browser. Some URLs are trimmed in the address bar, so the " scheme no longer appears, but " is still displayed. Trailing slashes on domains are also hidden, for example: becomes. įirefox 8 was released on Novem and prompts users about any previously installed add-ons. Upon installation, a dialog box prompted users to enable or disable the add-ons. Add-ons installed by third-party programs were disabled by default, but user-installed add-ons were enabled by default. Mozilla judged that third-party-installed add-ons were problematic, taking away user control, lagging behind on compatibility and security updates, slowing down Firefox startup and page loading time, and cluttering the interface with unused toolbars. įirefox 9 was released on December 20, 2011, includes various new features such as Type Inference, which boosts JavaScript performance up to 30%, improved theme integration for Mac OS X Lion, added two-finger swipe navigation for Mac OS X Lion, added support for querying Do Not Track status via JavaScript, added support for font-stretch, improved support for text-overflow, improved standards support for HTML5, MathML, and CSS, and fixed several security problems. Gecko version number bumped to 5.0 to match (and from then on stay synced to) Firefox's major version number.Background tabs have setTimeout and setInterval clamped to 1000 ms to improve performance.Better WebGL security (WebGL content can no longer load cross-domain textures).Improved desktop environment integration for Linux users.Improved spell checking for some locales.Improved canvas, JavaScript, memory, and networking performance.Better tuned HTTP idle connection logic.īetter visibility for the Do not track header preference.Better standards support for HTML5, CSS3, MathML, XHR, and SMIL.It also features a large list of bug fixes.
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