Next Version of Firefox Due Late 2008 or Early 2009
The next version of Mozilla’s open-source Firefox browser is due for a release in late 2008, or early 2009 at the latest.
According to the notes from a recent production meeting, the first alpha release of Firefox 3.1 is due in July. Beta releases will likely commence in August. Such rapid development is possible because the team isn’t going to concentrate on new features for 3.1, only on improvements to performance and on fine-tuning the browser’s behavior.
The full meeting notes are on the Mozilla.org developer site.
What should we expect to see in Firefox 3.1? Improvements to Places, the underlying bookmark management and database system that powers the “Awesome Bar,” for one. We’ll get better tagging performance, including the ability to edit multiple tags at once. We should also get the ability to delete URL records from the database so they don’t show up in Awesome Bar searches.
We should also see improvements to Firefox’s JavaScript engine, support for the <video> tag and better support for the web standards outlined in the ACID 3 test. Plus lots of little things: better forms performance, a cleaner shutdown experience and improvements to the site ID and password manager security features.
We’ll have a full review of the alpha as soon as its released later this month.
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