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Mozilla Aims To Release Four Firefox Versions In 2011
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.
It's clear the company no longer thinks this model is a good one, and wants to accelerate its release cycle
It sort of sounds more like they want to remove minor version numbers, and make every update a new major version.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Releasing 4 major versions in one year is immature, and Mozilla should no better. What motivation do they have other than competing with the other browsers that have higher version numbers? Stupid.
Hariyfeet, if you read this, I want to remind you once again that Firefox deciding not to make use of Windows Integrity Controls is not equivalent to running the browser as a root process. Sigh.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
Someone has caught the chromoenza!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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!
This is a major reason why I use firefox, chrome may be open source but firefox extends that to open governance.
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.
Exactly. The change to calling each one of them "major" versions appears to be simply cosmetic - who cares what the number is, people will use the latest stable version, whichever that happens to be; if there is no stable version, they'll simply move to using Chrome or Safari.
Basically, all Mozilla has done is said, "Everything we would have released in a big chunk next November will be delivered in 4 smaller chunks, one each quarter."
In theory, the releases will be more tightly focused, with shorter durations, and fewer features to implement translating to more thorough bug testing and bug fixing. This is a good thing.
In practice, as you noted... no guarantees. I expect at least 2 of them will be significantly late and / or significantly reduced in scope from their current roadmap.
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.
Why not just express version numbers in binary?
Thus version 4 would be released as version 100, and version 5 would be 101
That should be enough for this year , and jump way ahead of the opposition.