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Mozilla sets sights on Firefox 3.0

Colin Barker ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 17 Oct 2006 17:05 BST

Proving that the truly modern company stays nimble on its feet, just as Mozilla had all but finished working on the final version of Firefox 2.0, it announced it is ready to start on the successor, Firefox 3.0.

Release Candidate 3 (RC3) of Firefox 2.0 was posted on Monday. This is likely to be the final version prior to its official launch. (You can download the release candidate from Mozilla.)

Mozilla also made the announcement on Monday that it was ready to start work on Firefox 3.0. The announcement was made through a release on the Firefox wiki that invited participants to take part in a "feature brainstorm" of Firefox 3.0.

"We are currently in the early development stage for Firefox 3, and would like to collect all the ideas for feature enhancements in a single place," the statement read. "Our goal is to create a single index that lists what sorts of things we're thinking of doing.".

More information is available on the wiki, where there are already many ideas for potential improvements to Firefox. These include the creation of desktop shortcuts to work with Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE), user-controlled style sheets, the option to customise shortcuts and a host of other features. User response began to flow in immediately.

While Firefox 3.0 gets ready in the wings, the launch of RC3 of Firefox 2.0 promises to be important for Mozilla. Until recently it has been gaining share on IE, although it still has only around 10 to 12 percent of the browser market to IE's 82 percent.

Recent figures have indicated that its growth against IE has begun to slow, leaving users wondering if it can recover momentum with the official launch of version 2.0.

Changes made to Firefox 2.0 include an updated user interface, built-in anti-phishing, inline spell checking, improved tabbed browsing and search capabilities, browser session recovery and an updated add-ons/extensions manager.

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Its the applications and device drivers that run on windows that cement its dominance. How many people would fork out hundreds of pounds for Vista if Linux ran all the software and kit they wanted to use.