Firefox changes development plan - dumps 3.7

Mozilla has made changes to the development process of Firefox. The new features planned for version 3.7 will be released as security updates over the year, explained a company today. The changes will be incrementally applied over the year, instead of one big 3.7 release so that new features reach the end user earlier.

That means Firefox 3.7 is off the schedule for now. It was planned for the second quarter of 2010, but now after releasing 3.6 the next major version will come at the end of 2010or even early 2011.

"I'm proud of how we challenged ourselves," said Beltzner, referring to the quick-strike schedule that Mozilla plotted out for Firefox 3.6, but didn't meet. Mozilla had slated Firefox 3.6 for a November 2009 release, but pushed back the ship date as it worked out bugs and added additional beta builds to the cycle. Firefox 3.6 reached the "release candidate" (RC) stage last week, and should wrap up before the end of this month.

"We learned an awful lot about what slows down our schedule, and that will help us plan future releases," Beltzner said.

"The first target for [a minor update] will be separation of plug-in processes from the browser," said Beltzner. Mozilla is already working on a project, called "Electrolysis" where Firefox will run each tab as a separate process. The idea is to prevent a single site running in one tab from crashing the entire browser. Google's Chrome, for example, already has this capability.

Rather than wait to complete the entire Electrolysis project, Mozilla will instead separate the processes of specific plug-ins -- Adobe's Flash is the lead candidate -- so that if the plug-in crashes, Firefox itself isn't brought to its knees. According to Beltzner, Flash is responsible for more Firefox crashes than any other plug-in.

Source: Computer World