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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."
But so what?
There's nothing in the article or summary that hasn't already been covered in the other 76 articles about Firefox in the last 2 months.
Firefox team is still developing Firefox... shit, so is Opera, so is IE, Safari, etc, etc...
Firefox 2.0 was also supposed to be a quick development, based on the same gecko branch. It eventually took about a year.
I think the past record of Mozilla.org has repeatedly shown that it is unable to release a product on time, given the huge amount of testing/fixing iterations that must come before the final release. A Firefox "quick release" will take time, and divert resources from important future projects such as Gecko 2.
I would have thought Mozilla.org would have finally admitted that the architecture and development model of Firefox is characterised by long maturation times. This is needed to keep up its high quality level.
I do have add-ons installed and it hasn't crashed once. Aren't anecdotes fun?
I'd really rather they focus on important things first. The Acid tests are specifically much harder than what a browser needs to handle to do a good job with web browsing, in fact a few of the tests specifically use broken code IIRC.
Really the updates to the bookmark system scheduled for 3.1 are probably going to make a bigger impact on most users than Acid compliance would.
I think the main point of getting 3.1 out there is to get the features in that couldn't be completed for 3.0 but weren't necessities. And with the level of rebuilding that 3.0 required it's not a shock that a few less important features would have to be dropped to get the important stuff finished.
The Acid tests are specifically much harder than what a browser needs to handle to do a good job with web browsing, in fact a few of the tests specifically use broken code IIRC.
The things tested by ACID3 are not in general use because browsers don't reliably support them. Many would be in use if they were actually supported. That is the aim of ACID3, to drive browser makers to actually fix these things so people can finally start using them.