Mozilla plans to release Firefox 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, and 7.0 in 2011

[safan80]

This is good because the current android betas suck in performance compared to Dolphin and the good addons like noscript and adblock do not work ing them do to the changes being made to the mobile FF.

As for the two more betas of FF 4... the nightlies went through Beta11 like wildfire and are already on beta12.


http://www.techspot.com/news/42297-m...0-in-2011.html

Mozilla roadmap
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Roadmap

Mozilla is planning to release four new versions of its open source browser by the end of this year. That means that Firefox 4.0, Firefox 5.0, Firefox 6.0, and Firefox 7.0 are all slated to ship in 2011.

The four new versions is just one of the company's goals for this year. Here are seven points that the company currently has listed as its Product Priorities for 2011 on its Firefox/Roadmap wiki page:

Ship our new technology to users in smaller bundles, more frequently: four technology shipment vehicles in 2011 (including Firefox 4) and achieve a regular cadence for shipping
Develop a product that is responsive from "click to render": no more than 50ms delay between user action and application reaction, provide optimizations to hide network latency, and obtain metrics from users in addition to our test infrastructure
Expand the Open Web Platform to include Apps, Social and Identity: Design and implement open systems for Identity and social interactions, design and implement Web Application Framework, and implement missing pieces of CSS/HTML required for compelling Web Applications
Never lose the user's data or state: continue to improve stability, mitigate the cost of application failure, and interact with cloud-based storage to allow users to "take it with them"
Shine the primary UI until it gleams: determine and optimize top 5-10 user interaction flows (ie: search for restaurant), improve tools for customization/restoration of old functionality so we can remove it from primary UI, and improve user interface polish so that Firefox feels modern, graceful and elegant
Support modern operating systems and platforms: Windows 64-bit, OSX 10.7, Android 3.0, and ARM CPUs
Plan for a future where Desktop, Mobile and Web Apps run on a common platform: need to design and architect towards this eventual outcome though implementation of this is not a priority

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.

[saaya]

soooo ff4 is not ready... thats why they are releasing it and will then release 3 more versions after that?
sorry i dont get it... you ask somebody to build a house, hes only half done, then he tells you he will finish not only your hose by the deadline, but even 3 more houses down the road... am i the only one who is confused by this... "improved" roadmap? 0_o

and the lack of focus on mobile browsers is a big letdown... theres so much room to grow there...

[safan80]

soooo ff4 is not ready... thats why they are releasing it and will then release 3 more versions after that?
sorry i dont get it... you ask somebody to build a house, hes only half done, then he tells you he will finish not only your hose by the deadline, but even 3 more houses down the road... am i the only one who is confused by this... "improved" roadmap? 0_o

and the lack of focus on mobile browsers is a big letdown... theres so much room to grow there...

They switch the mobile version to be based off of FF 4.0.. With all the feature the engine that 4.0 uses I think the other version will be gui tweaks to emphasize certain features.

The mobile platform is just taking off it was more of a niche market before. I've tried a lot of browsers including opera mini and so far none are as refined as dolphin. The browsers that come standard with mobile devices are horrid.

[Chrono Detector]

When I tried Firefox 4 I thought the GUI looked like to be honest, I hate it how other browsers are trying to copy Internet Explorer by placing the back/forward button on the left and others on the right side of the screen... WTF, how inconvenient is that. And why disable the toolbar menu by default anyway? I know you can turn it back on, but still, its annoying.

[danielkza]

When I tried Firefox 4 I thought the GUI looked like to be honest, I hate it how other browsers are trying to copy Internet Explorer by placing the back/forward button on the left and others on the right side of the screen... WTF, how inconvenient is that. And why disable the toolbar menu by default anyway? I know you can turn it back on, but still, its annoying.

Who uses Firefox's default interface anyway? If you don't want to customize go use Opera or something

[vohu manah]

I've noticed some webpage's layout look all messedup in FireFox, and FF4beta is even worse at this than FF3, however, nothing of value was lost. It's my preferred browser, because I can costomize the hell out of it, and if a webpage is well designed, then it will be shown in my browser.

I'm looking forward to the newer versions.

[zalbard]

soooo ff4 is not ready... thats why they are releasing it and will then release 3 more versions after that?
sorry i dont get it... you ask somebody to build a house, hes only half done, then he tells you he will finish not only your hose by the deadline, but even 3 more houses down the road... am i the only one who is confused by this... "improved" roadmap? 0_o

First of all, that's just a product map.
Secondly, these are just numbers. So we'll have FF5 instead of 4.1, and so on. They want to go the same way Chrome does in this case.
Opera, Chrome, IE, all of them are quite ahead version number wise, and they see it necessary to fix this in order to attract some non-tech-savvy users.

[saaya]

They switch the mobile version to be based off of FF 4.0.. With all the feature the engine that 4.0 uses I think the other version will be gui tweaks to emphasize certain features.

The mobile platform is just taking off it was more of a niche market before. I've tried a lot of browsers including opera mini and so far none are as refined as dolphin. The browsers that come standard with mobile devices are horrid.

Thank you! So I'm not the only one who has a hard time with mobile browsers
I'm curious how they want to scale ff4 down to work on Android though... its a way different thing...

First of all, that's just a product map.
Secondly, these are just numbers. So we'll have FF5 instead of 4.1, and so on. They want to go the same way Chrome does in this case.
Opera, Chrome, IE, all of them are quite ahead version number wise, and they see it necessary to fix this in order to attract some non-tech-savvy users.

Yeah that's my point... they make it sound as I'd they would push more aggressively for new versions when actually they just change the names of their releases to make of look like they are progressing more, no? Kinda like NVIDIA and ATI renaming cards to make them look newer and faster

[zalbard]

I'm curious how they want to scale ff4 down to work on Android though... its a way different thing...

Not sure about the exact details.
Android is Linux based, though, and FF runs great on Linux, so guess there shouldn't be too much trouble.

[saaya]

Not sure about the exact details.
Android is Linux based, though, and FF runs great on Linux, so guess there shouldn't be too much trouble.

Well that isn't everything ...
Mobile browsers need a lot of extra features...
There is no mouse over, how does the browser handle mo menus?
There is no precise mouse pointer...
There are no key shortcuts
There is no scroll wheel
Display res is way lower and a lot of zooming needs to be done
Typing url is a huge pain, how do you work around this?
There is no right click either

Right now mobile ff sux cause it doesn't handle all this very well
Sounds to me like they still don't understand this...
Almost seems like they never actually used a smartphone and only work with the sdk on a pc with mouse and keyboard and big display :p

[kromosto]

so firefox will be like ati drivers

[safan80]

Almost seems like they never actually used a smartphone and only work with the sdk on a pc with mouse and keyboard and big display :p

That's the reality sadly with the mobile version right now, the devs seem to only be using the win32 or linux i686 builds of the mobile browser and it runs an phone emulator, so they are still using their desktops to test the mobile builds The Fennec nightlies for android fail to even load on my tablet and smartphone. I'm betting though after they finish their number 1 priority (FF4) they will refine the mobile version a lot faster. Most of the FF user base is still not even aware that a mobile version of FF exists or needs a lot of work, check out mozillazine for proof.

[XSAlliN]

soooo ff4 is not ready... thats why they are releasing it and will then release 3 more versions after that?
sorry i dont get it... you ask somebody to build a house, hes only half done, then he tells you he will finish not only your hose by the deadline, but even 3 more houses down the road... am i the only one who is confused by this... "improved" roadmap? 0_o

and the lack of focus on mobile browsers is a big letdown... theres so much room to grow there...

It's a "Fashion thing" - see GC.

[Pontos]

Uh, i think someone is making assumptions... Getting four full fledged versions of the browser in twelve months? Only in development heaven.

FF4 has been in development for like a year now. The first beta was released six months ago, and just now they released the eleventh.
Final version is expected in a month or two.

There is no way they will release new versions like that, only minor updates (Bug and stability fixes, usually called minor versions, like 3.6.13).
The jump from 3.0 to 3.5 (Originally called 3.1), the jump from 3.5 to 3.6 and the jump from 3.6 to 4.0 (originally called 3.7) took a year or more each.

I call BS or really reducing the changes needed to justify a mayor version releases.

EDIT: For those giving Chrome as an example, that browser is bumping the mayor version number every forty or so revisions, and they release seven or so of those per week... The mayor version bumps are hardly justified in most of these.
Check http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/releases/. First Chrome 10 revision was two months ago. First Chrome 11 revision was two weeks ago...
Expect the hot new Chrome 12 by March, and Chrome 99 by this decade's end!

[leomax]

Not sure about the exact details.
Android is Linux based, though, and FF runs great on Linux, so guess there shouldn't be too much trouble.

I would think primary target would be maemo/meego ,
They are regularly releasing for N900 (although no where as frequent as desktop).

[bamtan2]

the mozilla guys have been idiots for a few years now. you could see it in their organizational changes. more recently you could see it in their new firefox gui proposal (exact clone of chrome, which was kicking their butts), and the new development and release system (an exact clone of chrome, which is kicking their butts)

[XSAlliN]

Uh, i think someone is making assumptions... Getting four full fledged versions of the browser in twelve months? Only in development heaven.

FF4 has been in development for like a year now. The first beta was released six months ago, and just now they released the eleventh.
Final version is expected in a month or two.

There is no way they will release new versions like that, only minor updates (Bug and stability fixes, usually called minor versions, like 3.6.13).
The jump from 3.0 to 3.5 (Originally called 3.1), the jump from 3.5 to 3.6 and the jump from 3.6 to 4.0 (originally called 3.7) took a year or more each.

I call BS or really reducing the changes needed to justify a mayor version releases.

EDIT: For those giving Chrome as an example, that browser is bumping the mayor version number every forty or so revisions, and they release seven or so of those per week... The mayor version bumps are hardly justified in most of these.
Check http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/releases/. First Chrome 10 revision was two months ago. First Chrome 11 revision was two weeks ago...
Expect the hot new Chrome 12 by March, and Chrome 99 by this decade's end!

That's why i said it's "Fashion Related".

[Kingcarcas]

The sellout effort has begun, well it was a good run R.I.P. FF

[Calmatory]

the mozilla guys have been idiots for a few years now. you could see it in their organizational changes. more recently you could see it in their new firefox gui proposal (exact clone of chrome, which was kicking their butts), and the new development and release system (an exact clone of chrome, which is kicking their butts)

So you're saying that opting for better features first implemented by competitors makes these guys idiots? What would you call them if they didn't do this at all? Idiots? Yay, idiots everywhere!

Oh, and I use Opera since it's best of them all.

[sutyi]

I personally couldn't care less about the version number on any of the browsers.

If you ask me Mozilla just tried too hard to cram everything into one big update and started to work on too much stuff simultaneously. After a while down the road they probably realized that with this much stuff to implement and test, the "final" FF4 will never see the day of light. Even after ditching a handful of stuff FF4 is now in b12 in the trunk and it's still probably at least another beta trunk away from being released...

They should have implemented the new java engine and GPU acceleration, while delivering the rest in 4.1, 4.2, etc. incremental updates instead of this.

In the future they should work under the aegis of the idiom: "Don't bite more than you can chew..."

[zalbard]

The sellout effort has begun, well it was a good run R.I.P. FF

Um, no need to overreact.
They aren't making any money on this.
And it is just a number, who cares.