AfterDawn: News

Mozilla plans to release Firefox 7.0 by end of year

Just weeks away from launching Firefox 4.0, Mozilla has revealed its roadmap for 2011, which ends with the launch of Firefox 7.0 by the end of the year.

Overall, the company has seven main goals:

1. Ship Firefox 4, 5, 6 and 7 in the 2011 calendar year
2. Always respond to a user action within 50 ms
3. Never lose user data or state
4. Build Web Apps, Identity and Social into the Open Web Platform
5. Support new operating systems and hardware
6. Polish the user experience for common interaction tasks
7. Plan and architect for a future of a common platform on which the desktop and mobile products will be built and run Web Apps

Number 4 is particularly of note, as the company plans to open up support to Windows 64-bit, OSX 10.7, Android 3.0 and ARM CPUs, meaning Firefox should be headed to tablets and smartphones.

Firefox 4 just launched in Beta 11, with one more beta expected before a release candidate.

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 8 Feb 2011 22:10

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• 8 comments

• ROMaster2

  I'd rather just have Firefox with big updates every so often.

  8.2.2011 22:30 #1

• tatsh

  Chrome-style development; I think it better fits Chrome. Firefox just needs to fix bugs (memory leaks mainly) and perform close-enough to Chrome (or better, which would make me switch back). I'm always on browser beta's so release cycle means nothing to me except when I need to ensure a site works on the next release for end-users. This could actually cause more pain than help in the web development community (although not nearly as much as Microsoft has done, leaving IE6 around for over 5 years).

  8.2.2011 22:56 #2

• moondad

  Maybe its just me but my Firefox takes forever to shut down.
  When I close a program then try to open another shortcut it takes a good 2 seconds before it will open , meanwhile I get two error messages telling me Firefox is still open and I must close it before i can open another program.
  

  9.2.2011 00:29 #3

• ZippyDSM

  why? you do not need as many "numbers" as IE just let it alone and keep on changing the number when you overhaul the GUI a bit.
  

  Until lobbying is a hanging offense I choose anarchy!
  Ah modern gaming its like modern film only the watering down of fiction and characters is replaced with shallow and watered down mechanics, gimmicks and shiny-er "people".
  http://zippydsmlee.wordpress.com/

  9.2.2011 01:02 #4

• scorpNZ

  Beta 4 has been in the works for months i gave up on it since majority of add ons i use don't work with beta's & never have so by some miracle all these add ons are going to be ready with each new release yeah right pull the other one, by the time stable ff4 is here ff7 will be nothing more than an updated beta 5
  

  9.2.2011 03:26 #5

• ZippyDSM

  Originally posted by scorpNZ: Beta 4 has been in the works for months i gave up on it since majority of add ons i use don't work with beta's & never have so by some miracle all these add ons are going to be ready with each new release yeah right pull the other one, by the time stable ff4 is here ff7 will be nothing more than an updated beta 5 I know WTF are they thinking?
  

  Until lobbying is a hanging offense I choose anarchy!
  Ah modern gaming its like modern film only the watering down of fiction and characters is replaced with shallow and watered down mechanics, gimmicks and shiny-er "people".
  http://zippydsmlee.wordpress.com/

  9.2.2011 03:28 #6

• xtago

  Originally posted by moondad: Maybe its just me but my Firefox takes forever to shut down.
  it's real fast for me might be your computer not keeping up anymore or something bogging it down.
  
  I find at the moment that the current updates seem to be the theme stuff that I'm not bothered about.
  
  I actually think firefox is too bloated, it chews up my GFX card memory big time to the point of having 2-3 tabs open mean no games will run etc as the GFX card memory is sucked up by firefox even with basic pages.
  
  I find Opera to be the best though extremely fast the only problem with Opera is it's strictness on following the W3 rules for web pages so any pages that don't comply properly won't show up properly in Opera.

  10.2.2011 07:22 #7

• vanarie

  I'm on FF 3.6.13 and it's killing me. Every 30 minutes or so, when I open up a new tab or popup window, FF thrashes my drive for about 30 seconds before it displays the page. It might be some kind of crypto routine, but it's really really annoying!

  11.2.2011 10:20 #8