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Mozilla Pitches Firefox 3.1 Alpha For July Release
An anonymous reader writes "Just a week after Mozilla shipped Firefox 3.0, the open-source developer has proposed ship dates for the next version that, if approved, would produce an alpha release next month and a final no later than early 2009. According to a draft schedule discussed at a recent meeting, Mozilla wants to have the first Firefox 3.1 developer preview ready by July, then move to a beta by August. The schedule slates final code delivery in the last quarter of this year or the first quarter of 2009. A month ago, when Mozilla first started discussing Firefox 3.1 internally, Mike Schroepfer, the company's vice president of engineering, said the upgrade's target ship date was the end of 2008. If Mozilla holds to that plan, Firefox 3.1 would be its first fast-track update. Firefox 3.0, for instance, launched approximately 20 months after its predecessor, Firefox 2.0."
3.1 is badly needed! Firefox 3.0 is crashing left and right. I guess they were too eager to get it out the door.
P.S: I don't have any add-ons installed.
6 months isn't "quick", its only the Alpha in a month...that's about normal for most smaller software, especially for a point (*.1) update, this isn't Firefox 4.0.
Hell, Opera released 9.51 RC1 (now on RC2) just a few days after 9.5...
Its pretty normal as far as I see it, and I'm glad they are (or seem to be) returning to a more consistent release schedule, it may eventually become my default browser again, which it hasn't been since Phoenix.
Of course, at one time, Firefox 3 was targeted for a Q3 2007 release.
You can keep dreaming. While Firefox 3.1 is certainly going to improve on Firefox 3.0 (Firefox 3.0 gets 71/100, Firefox 3.1 pre-alpha 1 gets 80/100, I predict Firefox 3.1 final to get 80-90/100), the aim to make changes drastic enough to make Firefox 3.1 pass Acid3 and the aim to get Firefox 3.1 released in a Q4 2008/Q1 2009 timeframe are plainly incompatible. I'd expect Acid3 to pass in Firefox 4.0 myself. Shouldn't be much of a surprise given how long it took Firefox to pass the Acid2 test, but then that never stopped us from using it. ;-)
Firefox 3 included large scale changes to the platform, the rendering engine, and all kinds of other stuff. Firefox 3.1 is just user-level features that didn't make the cut for Firefox 3. That way, the UI guys have something to do while the engine developers work on Gecko 2.
Just remember to stay the hell away from Firefox ME.
Try installing flashblock. Those ads tend to steal a lot of cycles. Worked for me anyway.
I hope to see the html 5 video support added for Fx3.1
You're almost certainly going to get it, with Ogg Theora support at the very least (a DirectShow backend for Windows, QuickTime backend for Mac OS X, and GStreamer backend for Linux are also in the works). But the real question that no one seems to be asking is, where is HTML 5 audio support? It's just as much a part of the specification, and Ogg Vorbis is well-known enough that corporate entities aren't so worried about patents. I've seen some work on it recently, but I'm not sure it's mature enough to make the deadline. HTML 5 audio and video support in Firefox 3.1 would be a dream though. Safari already has at least some support for both, and Opera has partial support for audio with video surely not far off. Internet Explorer is obviously going to take a long time to catch up, but I guess we can't have everything...
Err, release dates, maybe?
Release dates, what's that? Firefox2 didn't even make it to 2.1 after a year and a half, and Firefox1 jumped right up to 1.5.
What is with Mozilla and their versioning?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
According to
http://www.heise-online.co.uk/news/First-critical-security-hole-in-Firefox-3--/110959
Fx 3.0 (and previous. 2.0.x versions) contain a flaw that lets "Attackers [...] inject malicious code into a PC by means of a crafted web site, and launch the code with the user's rights." Does anybody know whether this is going to be fixed in 3.1, or earlier, or if it's kept secret when it is going to be fixed or already is fixed?
I see something similar as well. I use linux and Firefox 3 on my work laptop, and at home while browsing www.smh.com.au, cpu will hit 100% and the browser becomes barely usable.
Interestingly enough, at work, I can browse www.smh.com.au without any issues.
I noticed that the stop button is clickable during the 100% cpu periods. When I click it, and it eventually registers, the cpu usage plummets back to regular levels.
I suspect there's some DNS shenanigans going on, because the DNS service at home can be flaky, and I noticed "looking for" like messages in the Firefox status bar. Firefox 3 most likely burns the cycles in some polling loop when waiting for responses to DNS requests.
Anyway, that's my theory. It's strange though, that only one site manages to trigger the behaviour for me.
Adblock with large filtersets tends to bog down on slashdot because the sheer amount of text/code it has to work through on each page (especially with the new comment system enabled) try disabling adblock to see if it helps.
Just kick out the damn buggy Adobe Flash plug-in.
It runs in the same process as Firefox :
It eats to much memory, slows too much the browser, and take the whole browser down with it.
Either disable it, or at least use adblock+ and noscript to avoid having 80 flash widgets running inside your 30 tabs.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I thought version numbers in open source projects don't matter?
Evens are stable, odds are not. Point-point releases are bugfixes, and point releases add functionality. Major version releases include major UI changes and break backwards compatibility.
FOSS versioning is important, but Mozilla does not follow it.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
That's the policy of a handful of projects. There's no such thing as an official "FOSS versioning", and if there was, what you described would not be it.
Once again, are you sure that's not just Flash?
Well, if it fixes that tendency to crash the browser if I close a Gmail tab, I'm all for it.
Switching Gmail to BasicHTML and then closing the tab preserves the session. And this ugly baby is easily repeated. Saw bug reports on both Ubuntu and Gentoo about this.
I dunno if it's FF3.0 proper, or the half-dozen extensions (which performed flawlessly under 2.0.14), but it sure is annoying.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Thank you. I was trying to post the same, but I apparently lost my cookies when I upgraded to FF3. Many projects use the {Major}.{Minor}.{Bug/Service Release} model, pretty much as described, but many only appear to use the model. For some, the second digit is the major version.
Sanity is like a condom: rather have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.
Acid3 is a dumb test. Acid1 and Acid2 tested against a number of dependencies and special cases to ensure broad compliance with the standard. That's what made them useful tests.
In contrast, Acid3 is a hodgepodge of features from different standards that are broken or unimplemented in different browsers. It lacks the coherence of the earlier tests. That means you can game it pretty easily by implementing one small part of a standard while not having a genuinely useful implementation. In fact, that's what several browser vendors are doing.
Instead of randomly picking features from HTML, CSS, SVG JavaScript, and SMIL, Hixie should have done an Acid-style test for each standard. That would make it a lot more useful, like the previous Acid tests.
Actually, Firefox 1.0 to 1.5 was just as big a leap as Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 was. Both had a brand-new, much-improved Gecko version, the core of the web browser.
Firefox 3.1 will be based on Gecko 1.9.1. Firefox developers just like to play with the version numbers.