Mozilla Firefox New Versions Delayed?

Mozilla Firefox New Versions Delayed

A few years ago, everyone was using Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser. As a matter of fact, IE enjoyed around 75% market share worldwide. Currently, Mozilla Firefox has a lion's share of the market, nearly 50%. The features, uses, and smoothness of Firefox, besides various other aspects, have helped it dethrone IE as the world's most widely used browser. Browsers like Opera and IE have their programmers working continuously to introduce newer versions in a bid to gain market share. Likewise, Mozilla too isn't sitting back and enjoying their success. Their programmers were pushing to meet the deadline targeted by Mozilla to release Firefox 3.6 in December '09 and Firefox 4.0 in the latter part of 2010.

But the 3.6 release has been delayed. It will now be out in the first quarter of 2010, while 4.0 might even come out in 2011. Such delays are quite common in the software and programming industry, but Mozilla development is even more furious since Google Chrome is out, and IE can bounce back anytime. Mike Shaver, Mozilla's Vice President of Engineering said, "We've always been more quality-driven than time-driven, but we understand timing in the market matters to our users and our competitiveness."

So what has Mozilla in store that can excite users? Future versions aim to improve performance and reduce start-up time on Windows by at least 25%. The incorporation of Jetpack, an interface for plug-ins that are easier to write, install, and upgrade is expected. Bookmarked or previously visited websites will get much quicker access. Then there will be the 'awesome bar' feature. Then there is the tab matching feature that lets people get access also to websites already open in other tabs. There will be separation of various computing processes into separate compartments, something that will work towards better stability. Plug-ins will be moved to a separate process from the main browser computing, which should help isolate problems with Adobe Systems' Flash plug-in. This will help avoid browser crashing and freezing. There will be an addition of Weave, a plug-in that synchronizes bookmarks, passwords, plug-ins, and open tabs across different instances of Firefox.

There are several other features in the new Firefox versions that will come along with the ones mentioned above, so it looks like we are going to take it as the wait will be worth it. However, it should be noted that some of the exciting changes will be only for Windows and Linux, and not Mac OS X.