Mozilla's aim to get Firefox out to the masses with a rapid release development cycle seems to be on track, as Firefox 5 has landed just 3 months after version 4 of the popular browser hit our desktops.

Back in February Jay Sullivan, vice president of product at Mozilla, said Firefox 4 would be "the last big release we're going to do" and stated that future instalments would be "smaller, quicker releases".  

"We're moving on web time now, and we've been shipping a little bit on desktop time," he said. "It's not necessary, so we're undergoing some process changes, and we'll do smaller bundles more quickly."

And that's exactly what Firefox 5 is. Don't expect any major changes from Firefox 4, just a few tweaks here and there.

In the good old days this would have been Firefox 4.1. Maybe Mozilla doesn't want to be put to shame by Google who is up to version 12 for stable releases and 14 for testing of Chrome.

Firefox 5 does have some new features though, including support for CSS animations, canvas - which adds two-dimensional graphics technology, and the do-not-track technology has arrived on Android along with Web Open Font Format support and smoother web browsing.

You can grab it now from www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/new/, although the servers seem to be taking a bit of a bashing at present. Our Mac download of just over 27MB has an ETA of 4 hours.