Firefox juggles plans
The Mozilla Foundation this week released a next-to-final version of its next major release, Firefox 3.6. At the same time the company announced last-minute plans which include dropping the planned 3.7 release completely.
The move means that version 3.7, planned for later this year, will not happen but a version 4.0 is still likely by the end of the year.
In an interview with ComputerWorld Firefox director Mike Beltzner said that the team had decided to rather issue incremental updates, along with security updates, every four to six weeks.
Traditionally Firefox issued security updates as one package and feature updates in a separate stream. Security updates are traditionally rolled out very regularly while feature upgrades were usually limited to one or two a year. Version 3.7 of Firefox was meant to succeed 3.6 as a significant update but now Mozilla says that it feels there is no need for a 3.7 version because the updates can easily be incorporated into 3.6.
Electrolysis
One of the major changes expected in version 3.7 was the inclusion of Electrolysis, a new technology for Firefox that increases stability.
Electrolysis effectively splits the process that displays the browser interface, the web content and plugins into separate processes. Doing this will mean that a single bad process or plugin won’t be able to crash the entire browser. This is similar to what Microsoft is planning with its Gazelle browser which is still in development and Google’s Chrome browser already includes this.
Although Electrolysis was intended to only be included in the 3.7 release, Beltzner said hat the development team decided that it was important to get this capability to users sooner rather than later, and so they decided to fit it in with 3.6 updates.
Beltzner has said that Firefox is not planning to roll out future releases in this way but that this particular time they felt it was important to speed up the release.
Firefox 4.0 is expected to be released towards the end of 2010.
Firefox juggles plans – Discussion
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