Firefox 5, 6 and 7 Coming in 2011

By | February 8, 2011


Firefox 5, 6 and 7 Coming in 2011

Pushes turbo button.

It looks like Mozilla is following Google’s Chrome path and will be releasing not 1 but 3 “major” Firefox versions this year.

According to the official roadmap, the following goals were set:

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

Mike Beltzner, the Director of Mozilla’s Firefox said:

Changing the way we ship products will require the re-evaluation of many assumptions and a large shift in the way we think about the size of a ‘major’ release

The criteria for inclusion should be no regressions [new bugs], well understood effects for users, and completion in time for a planned release vehicle.

Here is what’s planned so far:

Firefox 5
Account Manager
Simple Sharing UI
UI Animation
64 Bit on Windows

Firefox 6
Web Applications
FasterCache
OSX 10.7
JS Optimizations

Firefox 7
e10s? deXBLification?

Whether this move is a result of pretty much flat Firefox market share for the last year remains a mystery, but we would like to think so.


About (Author Profile)


Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism career back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

Comments (9)

Trackback URL | Comments RSS Feed

  1. Andylee says:

    is this the Opera Desktop Widgets they are trying to describe without mentioning the name? :-P

    • Yep, I once got into discussion on some “webapps” developer’s blog. They really do not like to hear “Opera Widgets”, and they instantly get very pissed of, when you mention it. Just like nobody does when you mention Opera in general.

      • Somebody says:

        I wonder if Nobody will go on the same kind of rant against Firefox for this Webapps considering that he criticized Opera for ‘wasting too much time’ on Opera Widgets.

  2. Heath says:

    And can we just say it? Taking Opera’s GUI, taking Chrome’s update schedule … can Mozilla do anything new without taking it from someone else?

  3. max1c says:

    I’m sorry Netscape but there is no escape.

  4. Cammy says:

    This is awesome news. Firefox 4 is great, but I’m missing the account manager and a few other features that were dropped for Fx4. Now we can get them sooner on a stable version, which is fantastic.

    The only really free and liberating browser :D

  5. jrk says:

    Great news, but hard to believe. :)