Firefox 3.5 'Web upgrade' planned for end of June

[Brian Warkoczeski]

Firefox 3.5 'Web upgrade' planned for end of June

by Stephen Shankland

June 16, 2009

www.cnet.com

Mozilla plans to issue a release candidate for Firefox 3.5 on Friday and 
the final version by the end of the month, Firefox director Mike 
Beltzner said Tuesday.

The browser, code-named Shiretoko, began its life as a modest 3.1 
upgrade. But as Mozilla's ambitions expanded and other browsers such as 
Google Chrome exerted competitive pressure, the new Firefox was promoted 
to version 3.5 and its planned ship date slid back several months. You 
can grab the Firefox 3.5 beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Firefox 3.5 comes with a spate of new features--5,000 total, according 
to Mozilla. Among the major ones: built-in video; local storage to 
enable richer Web applications that can work even with no network 
connection; a private browsing mode; geolocation to aid Web pages that 
can benefit from knowing a user's location; and faster performance 
loading pages and executing Web-based JavaScript programs.

"We've added technology we think upgrades the Web itself," Beltzner said.

Mozilla squeezed in a post-beta-4, pre-RC1 Firefox update last week, and 
the official release candidate 1 will get mostly a handful of changes to 
correctly handle some unusual JavaScript situations correctly, Beltzner 
said. And because of Firefox's extensive beta-testing network--800,000 
people use the beta versions--Mozilla expects that RC1 will be the sole 
release candidate.

"We're aiming the final release around the end of the month," Beltzner said.

Firefox trails only Internet Explorer in market share, and Mozilla says 
its use is growing fast.

Update 12 p.m. PDT: Other features in Firefox 3.5 include support for 
Web workers, which can enable browser-based applications to run in the 
background; personas to more easily provide themes; downloadable fonts; 
better built-in graphics technology through CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) 
and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) standards; the ability to delete 
browsing traces for a recent period of time or specific Web site; and 
built-in support for the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) technology 
for better communications between a browser and server.

What's after Firefox 3.5?

Mozilla has a number of improvements in mind for the successor to 
Firefox 3.5, code-named Namoroka, and Beltzner said programmers are 
eager to get 3.5 out so they can get cracking.

One is a process isolation technology called Electrolysis that should 
help protect Firefox from crashes, said Damon Sicore, director of 
platform engineering. Competing browsers' process isolation can help 
keep the browser running even when one page or plug-in misbehaves, but 
Firefox today crashes in its entirety, employing the less graceful 
approach of trying to reopen the pages upon restart.

The first phase of Electrolysis will be to isolate plug-ins such as 
Adobe Systems' Flash so a problem won't crash the whole browser, Sicore 
said. "It's going faster than we expected. By the end of July we hope to 
have a prototype," a separate development version of Firefox where the 
technology can be tested, he said.

Next up for Electrolysis will be a broader isolation technology that 
separates the processes of tabs, he said. "The goal for that is 
somewhere around the end of year in prototype form," Sicore said.

Also in the future is a 64-bit version of Firefox for Mac OS X. "We have 
people working on that now, a 64-bit version on Mac OS X. The majority 
of that is supposed to be done by end of quarter," Sicore said. Again, 
loose deadline is for prototype work, not a production version.

Apple's new Snow Leopard operating system is fully 64-bit, including 
Safari, and Apple boasts that JavaScript runs much faster in the 64-bit 
version

Most Firefox add-ons should move easily to 64-bit versions, Beltzner 
said, unless they include binary software compiled specifically for 
32-bit operating stems.

Though 64-bit Windows is now arriving, "It's not one of our 
supported-tier platforms," Beltzner said.
Firefox also plans to improve performance in Namoroka, including 
start-up time and user interface responsiveness.
Firefox in second place

Firefox broke the lock Microsoft's Internet Explorer had on the browser 
market, and now there's abundant competition. Apple's new Safari 4 works 
both on Mac OS X and Windows, Google's Chrome is advancing the 
performance agenda, and Opera is trying to advance the state of Web 
computing.

But Mozilla has a big leg up on other IE rivals. Based on the number of 
machines that ping Mozilla's servers, the organization estimates there 
are 300 million Firefox users worldwide--a major increase from the 175 
million a year ago when Firefox 3.0 was released amid "Download Day" 
promotional fanfare. According to NetApplications, Firefox has 22.5 
percent share, a number that Beltzner said corresponds reasonably well 
with Firefox's own measurements.
"Our growth has been steady and strong throughout the past year," 
Beltzner said.

One of Firefox's competitive advantages is an active community, not just 
the open-source coders who help Mozilla with the core programming but 
also vocal fans, translators, testers, and programmers who write 
add-ons. That community has been helpful in places like Poland, where 
Firefox has nearly 50 percent market share, and Indonesia, where it has 
the majority, Beltzner said.