Firefox 4.0 Coming Late Next Year

Firefox 4.0 Coming Late Next Year

Tuesday, September 08, 2009 - by Amy Vernon
Look for Firefox 4.0 late next year, likely around October, according to a draft roadmap Mozilla updated on its wiki.

According to the wiki, this is what users should expect:

Process separation for chrome and content, new extensibility mechanism through APIs, revised UI on all platforms
  • platform enhancements
    • content and chrome in separate process
    • binary component versioning
    • new extensibility platform (JetPack)
  • end user feature enhancements
    • browser sync (Weave)
    • new UI on all platforms
  • speed and responsiveness improvements
    • tracemonkey engine improvements
That all means, like Chrome, Firefox 4.0 will have each tab functioning separately, so a browser crash won't necessarily mean you'll lose all your tabs.




Firefox 4.0 Mock-Up - courtesy, Mozilla




Firefox 4.0  - Tabs on top - image courtesy, Mozilla
 

Before all that, however, there will be 3.6, which will include Windows 7 integration, "awesomeformcomplete" and optimizations for session restore and startup. That's due any time now - scheduled for sometime from the end of the month through November.

Then, in the first or second quarter of next year - sometime in February, March or April - 3.7 is scheduled for release. That upgrade is supposed to improve startup time and run plugins separately to improve stability.


Via: Yahoo! Tech | News Archive | Tags: Firefox, Browser
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Comments

By Crisis Causer on Sep 8, 2009

Just give me FF less bloated, please.  Hopefully they don't make 4.0 actually use more memory.

By mentaldisorder on Sep 8, 2009

Since when is it more bloated?  I thought it has always been quite barebone.

By Crisis Causer on Sep 8, 2009

Safari and IE use less RAM than Firefox.  I personally would like to see more effiecient coding to remedy this.

By bob_on_the_cob on Sep 8, 2009

Yeah sometimes if FF has been left open for a few days it take up huge amounts of ram. I know I shouldn't leave it open that long, but I am lazy.

By 3vi1 on Sep 8, 2009

Safari and IE use *more* RAM than Firefox. You may be thinking back to FF2.

They largely fixed the memory issues when FF3 came out last year. 3.5 improves things even more.

The only time you'll see FF using more RAM is if you've been doing a lot of browsing in a single session. It purposely keeps things cached in RAM to speed up going back through history.

http://dotnetperls.com/chrome-memory

http://ejohn.org/blog/firefox-3-memory-use/

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2008/03/firefox-3-goes-on-a-diet-eats-less-memory-than-ie-and-opera.ars

 

By Dave_HH on Sep 9, 2009

Good info there, 3vi1!

By djw746 on Sep 9, 2009

3.6 is supposed to be released later this year and is supposed to embrace windows glass feature to its fullest (as well as run as fast as 3.5 beta).  I am very excited for Mozilla and as always appreciative of the nice add-ons.  Now if only they could get more steady support beyond the FF 3.0 architecture.

By Lev_Astov on Sep 8, 2009

That's really cool and I cannot wait! I love the whole "tabs on top" thing. That combined with the sweet aero glass thingie is really awesome looking. Anything to reduce the size of the UI and increase visibility of the content. Window borders have always been my least favorite part of Windows.

By realneil on Sep 10, 2009

I like Firefox and have liked it for years. I can remember abandoning IE years ago and never looking back because using Internet Explorer was like being slowly pecked to death by Chickens. All of the Adds and pop-ups drove me nuts.

Firefox had given me back my privacy and let me control my browsing experience to a greater degree, therefore winning my support and loyalty.

I haven't used IE other than for Windows Update for years.

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