Today, Mozilla has updated the Firefox 5 beta to release candidate status (download for Windows | Mac | Linux), which includes improves support for "future-Web" technology, speeds up the browser, and makes multiple smaller tweaks to the browser.
Following the path cut by Google with Chrome's rapid-release program, the changes to Firefox 5 are several orders of magnitude smaller than those made in Firefox 4 yet are not insignificant. Most importantly, Firefox 5 release candidate makes multiple under-the-hood tweaks to improve performance. Memory management, JavaScript rendering, canvas, and networking performance have been enhanced, and background tabs will load faster thanks to locking down the setTimeout and setInterval timeouts to 1000 milliseconds. Standards support has also been updated for coding languages like HTML5, SMIL, and MathML, and the browser now supports CSS animations.

Firefox 5 also disables cross-domain elements as the source for WebGL textures as a response to security concerns involving hardware acceleration. This will break some Web sites and prevent them from resolving properly, although Mozilla says that it is discussing solutions with WebGL developers.

The link for this article located at CNET is no longer available.