Firefox 4.0 Coming Late Next Year

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.


Tags:  Firefox, Browser