Mozilla Delays Incremental Firefox Updates, Version 4 Pushed to 2011

Posted 12/29/2009 at 6:56am | by Paul Lilly

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Browser delays are nothing new for Mozilla, so it shouldn't come as much surprise that the open-source outfit has pushed back the release of Firefox 3.6 -- originally scheduled to debut this month -- to sometime in the first quarter of 2010. And the next major release, Firefox 4, probably won't see the light of day until 2011.

While delays might be par for the course, they're still damaging. It was just recently that Mozilla declared Firefox 3.5 the "most popular browser," and while that's up for dispute, market share numbers suggest the second most used browser on the planet is on pace to pull ahead of Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer browser in the next few years. That's assuming nothing changes between now and then, such as Chrome building up a vast library of extensions and enticing users to switch.

When Firefox 3.6 does finally ship, and later version 3.7, they will both feature security and stability updates, including the ability to run tabs in separate processes, similar to Google's Chrome browser. Meanwhile, Firefox 4 is supposed to sport a Windows 7 look and feel, a year after the OS has been on the market.