Even before releasing Firefox 4, Mozilla is clearly looking forward. Similarly to what they’ve done in the past, they’re not holding back on new user interface concepts. The company unveiled today new mockups of a couple of new features and improvements that are slated for introduction with Firefox 5.
You could have seen this coming. Nine months have passed since Firefox 4 was announced and about a year since the development on this new browser started. Future Firefox browsers will be released on a much faster pace. Firefox 5 has a mid-2011 release date.
The first, and maybe most prominent one, is ‘desktop apps’. The concept is similar to Internet Explorer 9′s pinned tabs, customizing the browser’s interface to work better with the site, by adding website-specific tools, and letting users pin the modified experience to the Windows 7 taskbar.
There are also other improvements planned, such as a more streamlined search bar and add-on management.
Mozilla has responded to Google’s decision to release new browser versions every six weeks and make versions numbers virtually obsolete. In a note to developers, Mozilla’s CTO Brendan Eich wrote that Firefox 5 is likely to be available four months after the release of Firefox 4, which seems to be sometime in February.
“Cast a colder eye on your blockers,” he wrote and hinted that not every bug needs to be fixed in Firefox 4. “Some of them can wait for a dot release or Firefox 5 that I do believe will be only months after 4 comes out. We are going to a fast release cycle. It serves our users better. To do that we have to get this touch and go done with Firefox 4.”
The remarks come after Mozilla leaders have repeatedly noted that it is time to get Firefox 4 out the door and a software will never be entirely bug-free. “ Michael Toy at Netscape long ago coined the phrase ‘Zarro Boogs’ because you don’t really get to zero,” Eich said. “You do a touch and go and then you can release and people get all this benefit of Firefox 4 instead of 3.6. That’s what we need to do.”
I tend to agree and those who prefer quality over quantity will have to recognize that Firefox 4 has been good enough for a final release for quite some time. The continuous delays may have damaged the interests of Mozilla more than a more stable release could benefit. Mozilla’s crash report has been indicating for quite some time very low crash rates even for the early betas, which highlights that Firefox 4 is well past the 80/20 point – and the remaining 20% (or less) of bugs are insignificant enough to be ignored.
IE9 and Chrome are breathing down Firefox’ neck and Mozilla could use this new release to regain some momentum in the browser community. Given the recent messages coming out from Mozilla, I would not be surprised if we saw Firefox 4 Beta 11 early next week and the RC in the second week of February. The final release should be available by mid-February.
Images of Firefox 5
No comments:
Post a Comment