Firefox 5 Scheduled for June 21

[Guest]

Could just name it 4.1 or something. I really don't see the point of making a new version for a few new features.
That was the beautiful thing in Firefox until now, that it didn't follow the hoard.

 

[mitch074]

Some notes:

- Firefox 4 took a long time to come out, because it's powered by the first major revision of Gecko: 2.0. It entailed a MASSIVE rewrite. No that it's done, tacking or basing new features on it got much easier - thus the accelerated release schedule.

- When you install a new Firefox version, and said Firefox starts crashing for no reason, you should backup your bookmarks, security certificates etc. and wipe out your profile completely - extensions included. I know that on a computer I had, which started with Firefox 1.5, moving to 2.0 then 3.0 and then 3.5 and 3.6, sometime along the way I had to do this to make it stable. Once done however, it was rock solid.

- Firefox 4 uses hardware accelerated rendering: ensure that you install IE9 (it comes with a bunch of Direct2D patches) and all the latest Vista/7 patches, or (on WinXP and Vista) the latest DirectX version. On all platforms, get the latest release for your display driver.

- right now in the works are tab isolation (the first results of that branch were seen in 3.6.4, with plugin isolation), hardware acceleration on more platforms, better use of the cloud, and a furthering of the interface rework; these alone can justify a major revision.

- the previous release cycle used at Mozilla required one main developer branch (Minefield) whcih forked regularly for the stable releases; due to the monolithic nature of Gecko 1.x, this was the most practical solution; however, it also meant that developing a new feature required creating a fork, work on said fork, and rebase the work on Minefield regularly - which is time consuming, complex, prone to errors and release-unfriendly. The new system would allow better sync'ing between the different development branches, and go better with a rapid release cycle.

 

[back_by_demand]

[citation][nom]YeZ[/nom]What's wrong with version 4? What's the point of giving it a very short lifespan...?[/citation]
Because after going through 837 bets and RCs to release it and still not be faster than IE9 in the Grand Prix was so embarrassing that they had to get a new one out ASAP

 

[Silmarunya]

I don't know why Google sticks with numbering the Chrome updates - Chrome has become pretty much a rolling release (a good thing btw).

I just don't see FF working with such a fast, near rolling update schedule. For starters, FF's extension API renders many add ons incompatible with newer FF versions (unlike Chrome's far simpler API).

 

[cookoy]

talk about all the versions coming out. but not a mention as to what new features will be included. it may come to a point i just won't care which version i'm using.

 

[bison88]

Am I the only one that actually got more confused with how Mozilla names there versions after reading this article?

 

[X-Nemesis]

Yes fix the memory leakage. I leave FF4 open, come back a few hrs later and it's using up 1.5gig and growing!

 

[chaos133]

I think they just rushed version 4 to release it around when IE9 got released. Version 5 will be the true version 4.

 

[eddieroolz]

Its a shame that Mozilla is moving towards a very deceiving version number used by Google.

 

[soundefx]

Damn. I installed 4 today.

 

[Guest]

I hope they fix the huge memory leak. When 3.6 came out I switched to Opera mostly. Then when Firefox 4 beta was available, it was really fast and didn't cause disk-swapping slow downs. At about beta 12, they put the memory leak back in. Really bad in 4.0, even worse than 3.6. I'm back to using Opera for the foreseeable future in both my desktop and laptop..