Final Firefox 3 and 3.1 Get (Roughly) Dated

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

Mozilla has announced a rough date for final release of Firefox 3 as well as a date-driven release schedule for Firefox 3.1.

Firefox 3 is now slated for “sometime in June,” while Firefox 3.1 is scheduled for the end of the year. The delay for 3 (besides Firefox’s own bugs) is that Mozilla wants time for extensions to catch up. That’s my pet peeve with trying out Firefox 3 RC1 (and past early releases) as well. I don’t want to have to struggle without the extensions I’ve grown used to. Most of them aren’t obscure, but rather well-known, like Roboform and Tab Mix Plus.

Naturally the best user-experience would be no impact on users; the ideal situation would be for extensions to update themselves with versions compatible with 2.0 as well as 3 prior to the Firefox release, and then after installing Firefox 3, everything just works seamlessly. So far my experience has been a lot of hunting for beta versions of extensions for 3, so I have just given up for now, though I may consider trying again on a spare system this weekend.

Meanwhile, in a post on the mozilla.dev.planning newsgroup, Mike Schroepfer, vice-president of engineering at Mozilla, indicated the plans for 3.1 (emphasis mine):

There were a number of features that we held back from Firefox 3 because they weren’t quite ready - but they were nearly complete. These include things like XHR, native JSON DOM bindings, ongoing performance tuning, awesomebar++, better system integration, etc. This along with the overall quality of Gecko 1.9 as a basis for mobile and the desire to get new platform features out to web developers sooner has lead to us want to do a second release of Firefox this year. This release would be date-driven and targeted at the end of 2008. Any features not ready in time will move to the next major release. This is currently planned to be based on Gecko 1.9.1 - but if there are solid technical reasons for breaking frozen APIs we will bump the version number to Mozilla2.

Since it’s date-driven, that’s a pretty solid estimate for 3.1. Schroepfer also indicated that Firefox 4 has a tentative date of late 2009. Of course, that’s waaaaay off in the future, so that’s carved in butter, not stone.

In February Firefox passed 500 million downloads; it’s now at over 557 million. It’s made serious inroads into both corporation and personal use, vs. Internet Explorer; as long as I have my extensions, I personally won’t go back.