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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."
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.
Have to agree - not sure if its add-on related but since I updated several PCs to FF3 I have had about 2-3 browser crashes a week and one UK grocery shopping site makes FF3 just 'disappear'.
AT&ROFLMAO
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. ;-)
IME usually it's flash. install flashblock or noscript and enable only those flash movies you really want to see - haven't seen ff3 crash since I started doing that.
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...
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.
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.
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.