Firefox/Roadmap - Firefox in 2010

From: Mozilla Wiki

After Firefox 3.6 ships in January, the Firefox team has identified the following features to ship in Firefox in 2010 (not a comprehensive list, but the major user-facing focus points):

• Multi-process plugins (Flash crashes/instability don't bring down the browser)
• Transition to jetpack extensions
• New UI stuff: new Windows menu structure, platform integration
• Weave
• Updater v2.0: updates which don't interrupt the user
• More responsive UI (async I/O)
• Better startup time
• Integrated Developer Tools

There are two major release vehicles available for these features: a stability release in Q1, and a major feature release which will preview in June/July and ship later in the year.

In order that out of process plugins can get widespread testing while not disrupting our ability to ship regular security updates, a special project branch will track mozilla-1.9.2: weekly betas with multi-process plugins will allow for quick iteration and widespread testing.

Alternate Proposal: Firefox 3.7
In this alternate proposal, there is an intermediate release (Firefox 3.7) in June 2010 which is intended to be an unprompted (minor) update to Firefox 3.6. The purpose of this release is to ship web-facing features which are being prepared on mozilla-central, but are not good candidates for being backported to 1.9.2:

• D3D rendering on Windows
• multi-process tab rendering for Fennec, but not Firefox
• low-level debugger support
• SMIL
• CSS transitions
• CSS calc
• WebGL
• HTML5 parser?
• Layers?
• See also Userbaron/1.9.3_Alpha

Alpha1: ASAP Branch+Beta: 25-Feb (no later than 4-March) Final: 23-June
Details: 1.9.2 branched on 2009/08/13. Up through Feb 25 that's 6.5 months. At 6 weeks stabilization per three months development, that's 13 weeks of stabilization, or about 3 months. That puts stabilization as done at late May if the branchpoint is Feb 25. A few weeks for slack, and we get our late-June final.

The tradeoff of this release would be that web features would get to users sooner, while the proposed UI features would be delayed until later in 2010.


SOURCE

FF has came a long way in the last year and a half. The first time I used it, it was a true RAM hog. But you could see the potential. Late last spring, when 3.5RC was released, I tried it again, and except for one week recently, it has been my default browser. It has served me well, it's customized to MY taste, and I'll stick with it, unless something bad happens. Currently, I'm running 3.6.4 Beta. I actually run most of the betas as they become available as my default browser. I have an account with Mozilla, and report bugs when they occur. But lately, there hasn't been any to report. I look forward to FF 4.0.

Improved startup time would be a nice bonus, it takes quite a while to load on my machine at the moment (in comparison to IE and Chrome). I'm surprised at how fast FF is progressing

FF4 and IE9 should make things interesting, but "full" HTML5 seems a long way off. There are some simple attributes which aren't supported in some browsers, but work fine in others (such as a method of nice CSS rounded corners in IE8). For any coding geeks, there's a table on currently supported elements at Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...engines_(HTML5)

Firefox on my machine works fairly fast. Need to tweak it just a little though.

Does on mine, too. I've had no browser load and work as fast as the FF versions from 3.5RC to this date. Completely satisfied. IE, unless they do some major changes to make it better, more user friendly, and have access to more add ons, will soon find themselves in a major power struggle. As I've said before, Microsoft needs to transfer some of the employees that created Windows 7 to the IE department short term, and teach them how to do things the right way. IE is not at a total loss, but some fresh minds needs to be in there to reconstruct it, from the ground up.

i have heard of memory leak problems in FF and will be looking forward to devs to remove it in upcoming releases.

When people say something loads 'slow', what sort of times are we talking about? This can be a general question as much as relating to FF. In my expereince FF from clicking the launch icon to having the full page loaded is about 2 secs, maximum 3..

If things were taking over 5 secs then I'd be calling them slow.

I read it somewhere that it was Office 2007 team which was transferred to windows 7 for the development. They moved the person who was heading windows vista team to somewhere else..

It takes about 8 seconds from clicking the FF icon to loading the homepage for me - whereas IE8 is closer to 2 seconds. I tried this on a clean boot, just so there wasn't the usual cache.

Perhaps it's something peculiar to my setup that causes slow loading. I can see the Kaspersky icon going a little mad while FF loads, so it seems to be scanning it pretty heavily which I'm sure is a major factor.

Not to plug my own goods, but here's an article that covers more on FF4: http://tech.icrontic.com/articles/a-...t-big-version/