Just a couple of days ago, Mike Shroepfer, Mozilla Vice President of Technology, revealed the roadmap for the open source browser beyond version 3.0. According to Shroepfer, Mozilla plans to make available the final version of Firefox 3.0 by the end of June 2008, and push onward with the development of Firefox 3.1. In this context, Firefox 3.1 is planned to hit the second half of 2008, followed by Firefox 4.0 in 2009. But, at the same time, these versions are not set in stone. Mozilla might release Firefox 3.2 or even 3.5 instead of 3.1, and 4.0 is too far way in order to provide anything palpable.

"Although we are talking about a '3.1' as being the next Firefox release and a '4.0' as being the next major release to come from Moz2 (Mozilla 2, the successor of the Gecko rendering engine), the actual version numbers are likely not decided, it is just useful to have one for now to talk about. It also turns out to be easier to increase the version to what you are really going to use later than decrease it which tends to mess up extension authors and nightly testers," explained Dave Townsend, Firefox Engineer.

Shroepfer's version 3.1 contradicts the official Firefox Product Release Roadmap provided by Mozilla, which has a version 3.5 planned between 3.0 and 4.0. But, at the same time, version 3.1 might evolve at least to 3.2 if the situation requires it. This means, of course, that there is a chance end users would be running Firefox 3.5 by this year's end, although it is quite slim. Mozilla will most likely stick to the roadmap offered by Shroepfer and deliver Firefox 3.1 as the successor of 3.0, although version 3.2 cannot really be ruled out.

"Based on the current planned scope of the next release, its all but certain that we'll call it 3.1. If we need to bump api compat in a stable release before 3.1 ships, we'd just bump from 3.1 to 3.2. We've never done so though, and in any case once 3.1 ships, 3.0 has a six month support timeframe before it reaches end of life. If we needed to drop api compat during that timeframe, due to something major, its highly unlikely that we'd rev 3.0 vs. simply bumping everyone to the same 3.2, rather than having them go through two api bustages inside of six months," added Mike Connor, Mozilla Software Engineer.

Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is available for download here.