14 DAY TRIAL // If all goes according to plan, Mozilla might release no less than three versions of its open source browser in 2010, culminating with Firefox 4.0. The next major version of Firefox is scheduled for general availability by the end of 2010. Of course, this is nothing more than a preliminary estimate of the delivery deadline for Firefox 4.0, and an optimistic one at best. The fact of the matter is that, Firefox 4.0 could also slip into early 2011, which would leave just two releases of the browser in 2010, namely 3.6 and 3.7.
At the start of this week, the number of Firefox 3.6 Beta Testers was approximately 600,000, but expected to lower over the holidays. Mozilla shipped the fifth Beta build last week, introducing more than 130 fixes over Beta 4. Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 is currently available for download for early adopters. At the same time, the company is laboring to produce the first Release Candidate of Firefox 3.6. In this regard, testers could be getting their hands on Firefox 3.6 RC by year’s end, although this development milestone could also slip into 2010.
Early next year, Mozilla will offer the first minor update to Firefox 3.5. Firefox 3.6 will most likely be made available in January, but no later than February 2010. And it will be followed shortly by yet another minor update, Firefox 3.7. Mozilla is looking to offer Firefox 3.7 to users by the end of the first calendar quarter in 2010 introducing such enhancements as multi-process plugins, unintrusive updater, Async UI features and a reduced startup time.
It will be in the second quarter of 2010 that Mozilla will bring to the table the first pre-view, most likely an Alpha release, of Firefox 4.0. With version 4.0 the company wants to introduce Jetpack and Weave into Firefox, but also a major overhaul of the browser’s graphical user interface. The first Beta build for Firefox 4.0 is expected in mid-2010 with the final release either in late 2010 or in early 2011.
Mozilla has even kicked off the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge Winter 2009, asking designers willing to participate in the contest the following question: : "The Home Tab — What are some interesting uses of a Firefox-hosted start page?"
“In the upcoming releases of Firefox, we'll move the Home button to be a "Home tab" instead. We will keep the existing functionality where you can display a web page of your choice — or disable it altogether — but since we're moving this page to live in Firefox instead of on the web, there are some interesting opportunities,” Mozilla Labs revealed. “This page will have access to a lot more of the user's information since it never leaves the browser — history, add-ons, bookmarks, and pretty much anything you can see in Firefox at the moment. An explicit non-goal of this challenge is to design something like My Yahoo, iGoogle or similar start pages that let you put widgets/gadgets. This is not because we don't think this use case is valuable, but we're much more interested in what a browser start page can do with full access to the browser.”
Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 (Beta revision 5) for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 (Beta revision 5) for Mac OS X is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 (Beta revision 5) for Linux is available for download here.