Mozilla won’t make a 2009 deadline for releasing Firefox 3.6 and is giving itself more time to complete a major update, version 4.0. The organization behind the open-source Web browser had predicted a final release of Firefox 3.6 in December 2009, but the Mozilla Web site now includes “ship Firefox 3.6” as a goal for the first quarter of 2010. In addition, Firefox 4.0, which had been due in 2010, now is “aimed at late 2010 or early 2011,” with a beta due in the summer of 2010, according to Mozilla.
I don’t want to sound negative… but I’m yet to remember a Firefox release that didn’t slip the original release date… usually not by a small difference.
I hope Firefox catches up with the competition. responsiveness and stability should be the major concerns to the next release…
Well, it would seem to me that delaying it to finish it properly is far better than just releasing it to meet some artificial deadline.
I agree that Firefox as an application, is slow. As a renderer it’s pretty fast.
Stability issues aren’t something that I’ve come across so far, but it wouldn’t suprise me if others have, given the diversity of users.
I do however have a faint, yet present, fear that Firefox is slowly slipping away from being a lightweight product to a product with too many features distracting from other areas of attention.
The complain here is not really about delaying one product launch… as to make it better it would be really ok… the question is, basically all roadmaps from Mozilla seems to be pretty empty, as they don’t seem to be able to follow them… should they fix something to be able to release in time or should they set more realistic dates?
I really would prefer some realistic dates, and it sure would look a lot more professional from their part it they set this realistic dates and are able to follow them.
Depending on who is setting these dates, I don’t think that’s very fair at all. From a developer point of view, things come up that aren’t anticipated and sometimes things just have to be delayed.
Perhaps Mozilla are setting dates which are simply too ambitious and out of step with the developer population.
Yeah it would be nice to have realistic dates set, but it’s not that easy to predict the future, even for Mozilla.
I will agree with you however, that the roadmap is pretty bare. The promoted feature set of upcoming releases isn’t striking me as anything exciting. I’m not eve sure the 4.0 feature set justifies a whole new major incremental.
Why not just say it’ll be released “when it’s done”?
That’s what the sign above the gate to development hell says.
The 3.6 update – okay, fine, big whoop.
4.0 in late 2010?
Mozilla best hope the competition (by which I mean Google) is merely resting on its laurels (unlikely).
Oh well, I’d rather have a completed product come late, rather than an incomplete product come on time (Yeah, I’m talking to you Microsoft!!).
I still like my Firefox though…
–The loon
Firefox’s release schedule lately has been exhausting… every damn time you look a new version has been released. Add to that the fact that they cut 2.0.x’s release short. And to make it worse, they’ve been doing some major changes with the UI since 3.0. A break will be nice.
I have been forced to get used to the so-called “awesome” bar, which is tolerable if you set up a collection of bookmarks, but I have yet to find a fix for my major problem: they merged the back/forward drop-downs a while back, sloppily including BOTH back and forward… a pain in the ass to navigate. And there’s no sign of this getting fixed… just loads of additional changes which will probably make the Firefox experience worse. Bleh.
When I think about it… I actually appreciate Opera more, how after all these years, they’re keeping up with the times, yet at the same time still mostly the same as they were years ago. They’re not so much of a moving target in terms of UI that you have to get used to some pointless tweaks (and some really bad ones at that) every damn release.
You can fairly easily disable the “awesomeness” and make the actual address bar behave like it used to. See http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/06/17/dont-think-the-firefox-3-aw…
I kind of like the merged back/forward history. It clearly shows you what page you’re current on, in the correct order of your history/future.
Edited 2009-12-28 22:06 UTC
I’ve tried various hacks back with the 3.0 betas and none of them really made the bar behave *exactly* as it did–it just made it *look* kind of like it used to. It felt kind of like… well, a hack, and just not the way it was supposed to be. Since I’ve made up a long list of bookmarks to solve the “awesome bar” problem quite a while ago, there’d be no point in reverting now. Besides, I’m pretty sure I’ve tried that very hack you linked to (though maybe not from that page), or something very similar.
I don’t see why Mozilla has to go the way Microsoft went with Windows Vista and especially 7; make major changes, completely tearing old standard functionality. It makes me appreciate KDE4 even more; it’s great that they’ve got the balls to be on the bleeding edge and put new innovations in their desktop environment, but at the same time it’s great to be able to, for example, switch to the “classic” KDE3 menus and desktop.
What exactly is the problem with the AwesomeBar?
If it were named, Ub3rB@r, I’d be happy.
my only complaint is : please make it compilable with mingw distribution (i.e. no PSDK), anyway not a big deal.
Edited 2009-12-28 21:21 UTC
I have to confess that I didn’t like it at first, but after a few days it started to grow on me. Now I think it’s great! I find it awesome because it can “read my mind”, so to speak.
Yea, its great! I love it, it’s much better than Chrome/IE/Opera, it take less letter to access an URL.
But it does have some scalability problems… I now have a 550mb sqlite database, and with recent Linux Kernel regression with sqlite, it’s kind of getting slow, I would love to be able to use MySQL instead of SQLite (disclaimer: I love SQLite as a programmer, but now it’s just too much for it).
Vacuuming the SQLite DB did not do a thing (with a DB that big there might be some wasted space maybe, but perhaps you have already tried it)?
http://blog.mozilla.com/oremj/2009/08/20/speedup-firefox-with-vacuu…
If it DOES actually help, the browser should do it automatically (when starts up, is restarted, etc)… There’s no point defending the current DB setup if it does require the user to use such hacks to it work properly…
Not sure, but maybe the problem is having such unique bug files… I see other browsers not slowing down a bit using separate files, monthly files and so on… of course there’s the design differences between each other, but still something to compare.
Firefox 3.6 will introduce monthly vacuuming of the Places database.
Thanks for the tip! It cleared 150mb from it, firefox take less memory and feel faster!
I have yet to find any downside to this solution.
150 MB?!? Wow, that’s quite a lot of memory saved in one go
.
If you like to use it and maybe like Chrome’s UI a bit… Try the Chromifox Extreeme theme + Chromifox Companion add-on (and hide the menu bar
… with Alt it is a single click away 
)… the Vacuum Database option is provided for you in the theme’s rightmost menu item.
I made my own UI
I will keep it.
The other thing I love about firefox is XUL-UI, it is so easy to move/skin things around.