14 DAY TRIAL // While the general availability of Firefox 3.6 slipped into 2010, Mozilla is already planning ahead for the evolution of the next iteration of its open source browser. Nothing is set in stone at this point in time, but Mozilla could start cooking Firefox codenamed Lorentz, aiming for a March 2010 release. And just as Firefox 3.6 is designed to be a minor update to Firefox 3.5, Firefox codenamed Lorentz will kick up a notch version 3.6, also as a minor update. So minor, in fact, that the evolution brought to the table by Firefox Lorentz could be melted into one of the security and stability updates offered for Firefox 3.6, which is due in January 2010.
Mozilla developer Benjamin Smedberg reveals that out of the changes planned for the future of Firefox some “are non-disruptive, while some are definitely disruptive. The non-user-disruptive changes are: Crash-safe plugins (OOPP); Updater which doesn't interrupt the user; More responsive UI (async I/O, primarily); and Better startup time.”
The modifications enumerated above are pretty self-explanatory, with the exception, perhaps, of OOPP. The OOPP acronym stands for Out Of Process Plugins, and what Mozilla is attempting to offer Firefox users are crash-safe plugins. By leveraging multi-process plugins, Firefox will remain unaffected by plugin crashes and instability. To put it simply, Flash or Silverlight crashing will no longer bring down the entire browser.
“The desire is to get these features into the hands of users as quickly as practical. These changes will still require a large beta with 600k+ users. The code name for this release is Firefox "Lorentz",” Smedberg stated. Mozilla is currently considering to have "Lorentz" based on version 1.9.2 of the Gecko rendering engine, by simply backporting the new changes. At the same time, the modifications could be reserved for Gecko 1.9.3.
“I believe that backporting the OOPP work to 1.9.2 is a task whose scope and schedule implications are fairly well-known: the changes are limited in scope to a few existing files and the new IPC code. Most of the other changes (apart from the updater) have already landed on trunk and can be backported with minimal pain. In addition, we can mitigate risk for plugins by controlling which plugins are run out-of-process, using either a whitelist or a blacklist. With the project branch, I believe we could go to beta in the middle of January and release in late March/early April without disrupting the regular cycle of 3.6 security and stability releases. There are some issues to work out around localization changes on a stable branch, but I don't believe these will be insurmountable,” Smedberg explained.
The main advantage of having Gecko 1.9.2 at the foundation of Firefox Lorentz is that the minor update to Firefox 3.6 would not be confined to a single landing point. In this context, Mozilla could integrate OOPP in March and the updater in April, using nothing more than dot releases, namely stability and security updates, such as Firefox 3.6.2 and 3.6.3. Of course, there’s no telling at this point in time which is the direction in which Mozilla will take Firefox 3.6 and Firefox codenamed Lorentz in 2010.
“Doing a release from mozilla-central/1.9.3 presents a lot of schedule risk without matching reward. We would probably have to un-do changes that have already been made, such as the OJI plugin support removal as well as support for MacOS 10.4. Even if we went to beta in mid-January, the schedule needed to stabilize that branch for final release is much less clear. Doing a release from 1.9.3 also increases the risk of having to do a minor update due to extension compatibility from API and UI changes,” Smedberg added.
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.