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Mozilla Aims To Release Four Firefox Versions In 2011

Posted by Soulskill on from the what's-in-a-number dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla is planning to release four new versions of its open source browser by the end of this year. That means Firefox 4, Firefox 5, Firefox 6, and Firefox 7 are all slated to ship in 2011. Mozilla was originally planning on having Firefox 4 out by the end of last year, but it had to delay the release. The last release was Beta 10 but there are still probably two more betas, at least one release candidate, and of course a final build. It's clear the company no longer thinks this model is a good one, and wants to accelerate its release cycle, much like Google did with Chrome." More detailed information on the accelerated development cycle and the major features intended for each new version are available on Mozilla's Firefox 2011 Roadmap.

5 of 263 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Magic version numbers by omnichad · · Score: 3, Informative

    Fewer features in each major release should mean more time spent fixing bugs. Would hope so, anyway. Firefox 4 beta 10 uses 100% of my CPU almost constantly (on Mac OS X 10.6) and I have no idea what new "feature" is responsible for this.

  2. Re:Magic version numbers by Jugalator · · Score: 4, Informative

    Like accelerating the version number major releases suddenly makes the release cycle better. More bugs?

    I don't think so, and I don't think they'll rush the features. To make that equation work, I assume each major release will be less major than before. Like with Google Chrome. Why do that? Marketing? No, I think it's to stay more current with the latest web standards. In today's web, waiting a year for each major release will lead you to hopelessly fall behind. This is the reasoning to why Google are now doing this anyway (and of course, I'm sure they don't mind catching up with IE's version numbers either).

    --
    Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
  3. tl;dr from the roadmap by Warll · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is a major reason why I use firefox, chrome may be open source but firefox extends that to open governance.

    1. Ship Firefox 4, 5, 6 and 7 in the 2011 calendar year
    2. Always respond to a user action within 50 ms
    3. Never lose user data or state
    4. Build Web Apps, Identity and Social into the Open Web Platform
    5. Support new operating systems and hardware
    6. Polish the user experience for common interaction tasks
    7. Plan and architect for a future of a common platform on which the desktop and mobile products will be built and run Web Apps

    I would encourage everyone to read through the full roadmap: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Roadmap you shouldn't be disapointed.

    Edit: Ugh, slashdot ol means ordered list, stop styling it like a ul.

  4. Re:Magic version numbers by StuartHankins · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm running Firefox 4b10 on Snow Leopard also, and other than spiking when I refresh I'm 70%+ idle. With Parallels and X11 running, I might add.

    Maybe it's one of your addons, try disabling them all and reenabling them one at a time until you find the culprit.

  5. Re:Still problematic by yakatz · · Score: 3, Informative

    Firefox obviously won't install the addon if its specified "max version" is lower than the version you're using. So I have a couple of addons that I use in Firefox 4, where I've had to manually change the "max version" to FF4. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. More to the point, it's kind of annoying to deal with, and I don't expect your Average Joe user to go around editing XML files just to see if it's possible that their favorite addon works.

    That is what this extension is for: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/