MOZILLA LAUNCHING FIREFOX 5 JUNE 21

According to an update at the Mozilla releases page, Firefox 5 looks like it’s headed for a release on June 21, less than two months away. We haven’t heard anything about what new features the next version of Firefox will have, but when Mozilla said that Firefox 4 would be the last time they waited months between major releases, they meant it.

Mozilla is taking the same approach that Google is taking with Chrome; faster updates, more releases, and no waiting to bundle major features together into a bigger update that takes longer to assemble. It’s no surprised that they want to make sure the next version of Firefox is right on the heels of the release of Firefox 4.

To contrast, Google steadily and regularly releases updates for Chrome, silently downloading them and installing them in the background when a user closes and then re-opens the app. To date, each major revision of Firefox has been lauded with a laundry list of features and highlighted release dates. Mozilla developers are hoping to keep up with its browser competitors by slipstreaming bug fixes and minor updates more regularly, and introduce major updates as they’re available instead of waiting.

To help with the testing process, Mozilla devs have introduced dev and pre-release channels of Firefox in addition to the stable release build that most people have running. The dev channel will be the most unstable, with new changes and features added and removed on almost a daily basis, much like the current nightly builds. The pre-release channel, called Aurora, will include features and bug fixes that developers plan to include in the stable build, but want to test with a broad audience.

All of that aside, we still don’t know what Firefox 5′s features will be. Mozilla has said they want at least four major releases of Firefox in 2011, but the product roadmap doesn’t list major features aside from things like “anything that improves responsiveness and is ready” and “anything that improves stability and is ready,” among others.