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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."
People have said Firefox is multithreaded, and I'm no coder, but I know when a piece of software is using all available resources.
Firefox never goes above 25% CPU usage when I open up a new window (which in turn loads about 15 tabs). Maybe the Gecko rendering engine can't render two pages at once. All I know is that the Firefox becomes unusable/unresponsive on my quad core for about 5 seconds while everything loads. Chrome hits much higher CPU usage-- but it doesn't have [true] adblock.