Firefox 3.7 Dropped In Favor of Feature Updates

Barence sends in a report from pcpro.co.uk that says "Under its original plans, Mozilla would roll out Firefox 3.6 and 3.7 over the course of 2009, each bringing minor improvements to the browser. However, a steady stream of delays to Firefox 3.6 has rendered that goal unobtainable, forcing Mozilla to rethink its release. As a result, Firefox 3.7 has been dropped and will be replaced with feature updates for Firefox 3.6 that will be rolled out with security updates. This should free up the team to work on the next major release, Firefox 4, slated for the last quarter of 2010, which is expected to follow the same development process." Updated 20100116 00:54 GMT by timothy: Alexander Limi, from Firefox User Experience, says that the PC Pro article linked above misinterprets the situation, and that 3.7 is still on the roadmap before 4.0. The confusion stems from a schedule realignment: the out-of-process plugins feature, originally slated to land in 3.7, will instead ship as a minor update in Firefox's 3.6 series. According to Limi, CNET gets it right."

Comments

Gecko 1.9.3 and SVG animation

[compro01]

I wonder what effect this is going to have on the implementation of SVG animation, which is part of gecko 1.9.3, which was to be used in 3.7. Is it going to be slotted into 3.6 sometime or will it get pushed to 4?

Re:So much for Windows 7 support

[yakumo.unr]

Last I saw tab previews in the taskbar was the default for Firefox 3.6, I had to disable it any time I did a clean install.

browser.taskbar.previews.enable in about:config

IMO it entirely defeat the point of having tabs in ONE program, so only one app wastes taskbar space, even preview space

Re:Firefox development is poorly managed, apparent

[Enderandrew]

Have you seen $200 million worth of development in Firefox?

http://planet.mozilla.org/

Spend a little time reading this on a regular basis, and you'll soon discover how many projects Mozilla handles, and all the developers they're paying.

The big projects include:

Firefox, Bugzilla, Camino, Fennec, Lightning, Sunbird, Seamonkey, and Thunderbird.

These are major multi-platform projects.

Mozilla has several projects for first-party add-ons for all of the above such as Firebug, Chromebug, . Then they have tons of major projects that most people never hear about. At the moment they're working on:

Jetpack
Raindrop
Bespin
Concept
Personas
Prism
Snowl
Test Pilot
Ubiquity
Weave
Electrolysis

A tool recently said the KDE code based purely on lines of code should have cost $175 million to develop, and that wasn't counting Koffice, and anything outside the main KDE trunk.

Mozilla also doesn't just do code projects, they do tons of community management and outreach projects like Mozilla Education, which costs even more money.

They also help support outside developers using Mozilla and Xulrunner for other apps such as Kompozer, Songbird, etc.

I don't know where all their money goes, but Mozilla does *A LOT*. To suggest they're not doing much development is ignorance or lies.

Firefox experiences a LOT of crashes and memory hogging, and has for years.

Firefox does crash for me from time to time, on Windows and Linux. I tend to use a lot of extensions, and the most common thing I hear is that extensions are the largest source of memory and stability issues. Do I get daily crashes, or 10 crashes a day? No. And I run daily snapshot builds. I maybe get 1 crash a week, if that.

As a Systems Engineer, I troubleshoot and support some big money apps that crash fairly often. Large software projects are going to have bugs. However, I wager if you run without extensions, you'll find that Firefox is pretty damned stable for such a massive multi-platform app.

Memory issues are all but lies these days. Memory usage has improved so much over the past few years. Firefox is actually better with memory usage than Chrome in many ways. The core app doesn't take too much memory on first load. It doesn't have memory leaks.

There are some intentional features which cause Firefox to eat up some memory that you can turn off, such as Firefox keeping fully rendered pages in memory, so that when you hit the back button, they just display immediately without having to re-render. When you close a tab, it still keeps that full session in memory for some time, so that you can reopen the closed tab with full rendered pages and history if you want.

If you don't like these features, turn them off. Not to mention, these are set to use dynamic chunks of memory which is preportional to your total memory. If you have a desktop with 8 gigs of memory that you're not using, why get upset that Firefox is using 300-400 megs of memory?

Unused memory isn't doing you any good.

Stop with the FUD. Real geeks know better and see right through BS and lies.