Posted on Monday, December 28 2009 @ 19:24 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
One of the major new features in Firefox 3.6 will be Personas, a plug-in that makes it easier to customize the browser's appearance. Other improvements include faster launch time and improved security. More performance and stability improvements will make their debut in Firefox 3.7. The goal for this release is to cut start-up time on Windows by 25 percent and it should feature the first phase of Electrolysis, which moves plug-ins to a separate process to enhance the stability of Firefox.
The electrolysis concept will move to the next level with Firefox 4.0, this release will split each browser tab into a separate process. Additionally, version 4.0 will also introduce a new user interface that mimics some of Google Chrome's design.
The organization behind the open-source Web browser had predicted a final release of Firefox 3.6 in December 2009, but the Mozilla Web site now includes "ship Firefox 3.6" as a goal for the first quarter of 2010. In addition, Firefox 4.0, which had been due in 2010, now is "aimed at late 2010 or early 2011," with a beta due in the summer of 2010, according to Mozilla.More info at CNET.
Schedule delays are common in the software world, but browser development is furious these days with the arrival of Google's Chrome into the market, Apple helping to expand the frontiers of what the browser can do, Opera trying to dramatically speed up JavaScript execution and display performance, and Microsoft getting more ambitious again with Internet Explorer. "We've always been more quality-driven than time-driven, but we understand timing in the market matters to our users and our competitiveness," said Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, in an October interview.
