Firefox 3.5 Imminent

Author	Gordon Kelly
Published	6th Mar 2009

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Time to step up those browser wars again...

Having realised the magnitude of the changes, tweaks and upgrades outfitted for Firefox 3.1 Mozilla has realised it is underselling what has slowly become a major milestone release and it wants the world to know it.

Consequently the company has this week confirmed the 3.1 moniker will be scrapped in favour of a major headline grabbing 3.5, something it feels better reflects the gravitas of the build.

"The increase in scope represented by TraceMonkey and Private Browsing, plus the sheer volume of work that's gone into everything from video and layout to places and the plugin service make it a larger increment than we believe is reasonable to label .1," explained Mozilla's Interim VP of Engineering, Michael Shaver. "3.5 will help set expectations better about the amount of awesome that's packed into Shiretoko [build code name], and we expect uptake help from that as well."

Personally I'm not surprised at the move, in the light of heavy browser competition from the likes of the newly Webkit based Safari 4 and Google Chrome version 3.1 of Firefox has turned into a much bigger project than originally intended - it has also become far more important to Mozilla as a whole.

Of course the big goal here is speed, speed and even more speed since no other browser can compete with Firefox when it comes to sheer customisation and Chrome Extensions are still some way off. These third party add-ons do however come at a cumulative speed cost so Firefox itself needs to be as lean, mean and stripped down as possible at its core.

With Firefox 3.1 3.5 at pre-beta 3 stage we shouldn't have to wait long to find out just how fast it is...

Link:
via Betanews

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Francesco Mastellone said on 8th March 2009

There's no single way to number versions. Open source projects often have x.y.z numbering, where increasing x denotes breaking compatibility with previous versions, raising y ... more

haim said on 9th March 2009

For fear of repeating myself (as per my comment on safari 4 report), from my understanding Safari has always been WebKit. Webkit was apple's extension of KHTML, and they then... more

Cub said on 9th March 2009

haim - you're totally right, Safari has always been Webkit... And Apple do the vast, vast majority of the development work with Webkit. I too commented with this correction on... more