Posted 03/11/09 at 09:28:03 AM by Paul Lilly

After several delays, we were beginning to wonder if Firefox 3.1 would ever see the light of day beyond a beta release, and as it turns it out, it's not going to. Instead, Mozilla has renamed the once 'fast-track' update to 3.5 with a fourth beta scheduled for April 14, 2009.

"The increase in scope represented by TraceMonkey and Private Browsing, plus the sheer volume of work that's gone into everything from video and layout to places and the plugin service make it a larger increment than we believe is reasonable to label ".1". 3.5 will help set expectations better about the amount of awesome that's packed into Shiretoko," said Mike Shaver, Mozilla's engineering VP.

Shaver went on to say that the version change to 3.5 is indicative of the current scope and not intended to represent a significant increase 3.5's current make-up.

Still no word on when the next version of Firefox will go Gold, though if we had to guess, we'd say either May or June of this year.

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Posted 06/30/08 at 11:36:25 AM by Paul Lilly

If Firefox loses its marketshare momentum, it won't be because Mozilla's developers are resting on their laurels. On the contrary, programmers are already plugging away on the next version, Firefox 3.1. A recently proposed roadmap points to next month for an alpha debut, with a beta release busting onto the scene in August before finishing up the final code by the end of the year.

In addition to the usual bevy of bug fixes, Firefox 3.1 will incorporate several complimentary features originally pushed to the side in 3.0 due to time constraints. Portions of the Ctrl-Tab extension, such as thumbnail previews of open tabs and tab searching and filtering, are expected to finagle into FF 3.1, along with improved download options, better bookmark tagging, a more powerful location bar, and other goodies.

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