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.

Oh Great

[WrongSizeGlass]

I always love when a browser company gives me more versions (and their individual idiosyncrasies) to test and support. At least Chrome back doors updates to their browser so anything out there should be the current version (like it or not).

The new Version Number War

[rudy_wayne]

When Internet Explorer was at version 5, Netscape released version 6 of their browser. There never was a Netscape version 5. They jumped from v4 to v6 because they wanted to be newer than Microsoft. Apparently, Mozilla now feels they are "behind" Chrome which is currently at version 9, so instead of Firefox 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, etc., they will call them Firefox 5, 6, 11 and 23 so that they can be newer than Chrome.

It is sad how far off the rails the Firefox development process has gone.

Do Not Want

[Animats]

I don't want four browser versions in a year. I want one that works right. I'm tired of their browser hanging, taking minutes of compute time to exit, and unable to close some obnoxious hostile pages.

When the Mozilla crowd gets a bug-free 4.x out the door, with all reported bugs fixed, then they can talk about later versions.

(I'm underwhelmed with the Mozilla crowd. They come across as a bunch of Javascript hackers. There was a problem with duplicate entries in the internal SQLite databases, and I suggested making the fields a unique key, so the database would reject bogus updates. But that would have caused broken code to abort. Instead, they bolted on a Javascript hack to try to clean up the mess.)

Re:FF4 is crap

[supersloshy]

Actually, the latest nightlies have a statusbar-esque thing in the bottom left when you hover links or load a page, now. It's a bit like how Chrome does it.