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Mozilla Roadmap Update
wikinerd writes "According to a recent roadmap update for Mozilla, the beta 1.8 version will be unveiled this month, while in the next month a second beta will be prepared. After the Beta2, Gecko engine 1.8 will be finished and it will power Mozilla 1.8, Mozilla Firefox 1.1 and Mozilla Thunderbird 1.1. The developers will then start working on Mozilla 1.9. Here are some nice graphics depicting the roadmap."
The Mozilla Suite may not be disbanded, but how many people even know about it anyway? Its got its little niche, but whether or not it truly "goes away" now seems irrelevant. Firefox is the focus of all the publicity, and the Suite goes on about its business on its own.
Firefox is an attempt at seperating the browser component of Mozilla, and hopefully making it smaller, more portable, and more memory-efficient.
The rendering engine for both Seamonkey (the Mozilla Suite) and Firefox remains the same, the Gecko rendering engine. What differs is the UI, the functionality and large parts of the codebase.
Originally, Firefox, and Thunderbird, were scheduled to replace Seamonkey, but after some developers voiced their concerns over this, the Mozilla Foundation has decided against this move.
In short, it's not so much as code fork as it is a functionality fork. Firefox is geared towards IE/Opera/Safari users, while Seamonkey is geared towards old school Navigator/Netscape/Mozilla users.
The only official release of Firefox is 1.0. There are a number of outstanding security flaws in Firefox 1.0 as reported by Secunia and none have been addressed yet. I don't know if there is a nightly release that fixes these flaws, but even if there is, those are not the releases that Mom and Pop download, and it is that type of user that tends to be affected most by security flaws. Doesn't the Firefox/Mozilla team need to release a version 1.0.1 that fixes these flaws sooner rather than later? Unfortunately there is no 1.0.1 on the road map, and version 1.1 is not scheduled to be released until June, if it is on time. By then the oldest unpatched flaw, from August 2004, will be 10 months old! While the severity of current flaws is nowhere near MSIE territory, the age of unpatched flaws will be getting into MSIE territory (well, somewhat, anyway.)
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