Mozilla: Next Firefox release months away
Published: 17 Mar 2009 08:41 GMT
Mozilla had planned to release its new 'Shiretoko' version of Firefox in early 2009, but with the scale of changes made to the open-source browser, a date halfway through the year now looks more realistic.
After releasing Firefox 3.1 beta 3 on Thursday, the organisation behind the browser said a fourth beta is planned — and with the new version number 3.5.
"There are no plans for a beta 5 at this time, and after beta 4 we'll be looking to move to a release candidate," said Firefox director Mike Beltzner in a statement. "Of course, we stand by our commitment to ship software when it's ready."
Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard offered a loose schedule for when the final version of Firefox 3.5 might be ready, in a Twitter post on Friday. "Firefox 3.5 will be out once we do one more beta and some release candidates. No dates, but probably two to three months or so," Blizzard said.
In an earlier blog post about the Firefox version number change, Beltzner said: "The increase in version number is proposed due to the sheer volume of work, which makes Shiretoko feel like much more than a small, incremental improvement over Firefox 3: TraceMonkey, video tag and player support, improvements to user controls over data privacy, significant improvements in the web layout and rendering platform, and much more."
The browser wars are in full force, with Microsoft on the cusp of releasing the new Internet Explorer 8, Apple offering a beta of Safari 4, Opera trying to offer faster downloads and faster JavaScript in its product, and Google offering Chrome.
Changes in Firefox 3.5 include faster execution of web-based JavaScript programs, a private browsing mode, native support for the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) technology for exchanging data between servers and browsers, and built-in audio and video abilities for bypassing Flash or other multimedia technologies.
Credit: Mozilla says next Firefox likely months away from CNET News
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