Pressure from Google Chrome and, increasingly, from other main players in the web-browser market is forcing Mozilla to change its ways. Most notably, it's starting to rethink its update schedule and system for Firefox and favoring small incremental updates,
a la Chrome, instead of major releases months or years apart.
This is why quite a big feature like out of process plugins is now slated to be pushed with the next minor release, Firefox 3.6.4. The beta for Firefox 3.6.4, codenamed Lorentz, is now
scheduled to be released later today with the final build coming next month on May 4th.
The
big, new feature scheduled for Firefox 3.6.4. consists of
out of process plugins. The idea, borrowed from Chrome, is to have all the plugins, Flash, Java, PDF readers and so on, run in a processing thread separate from the main Firefox process. This way, if one of them happens to crash, it doesn't take the entire browser with it. The feature was initially scheduled for a later release, along with a major release like Firefox 3.7, but the code was backported from the Firefox.next branch, where active development for 3.7 is being done.
Regularly, minor updates are meant for small bug fixes and plugging security vulnerabilities. Mozilla has always left new features and big changes for the major releases, like 3.0, 3.5 or 3.6. This departure signals a different thinking at the open source organization, which, in the end, should benefit the users who will get their hands on new features sooner than they normally would.
It should be interesting to see if this trend continues, but, if it does, you can expect interesting, new features to be coming at a much faster pace. Still, it's unlikely that Mozilla will start iterating new builds as fast as Google does, though that is likely a good thing.
All the latest
Firefox builds are available for
download here.
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