Firefox 3.6 Delayed; 4.0 in Late 2010/Early 2011
Firefox 3.5 may be the world's most popular web browser now, but that won't stop Mozilla from pushing ahead to release 3.6 and eventually 4.0. Of course, maybe the lead in web share now has Mozilla a little bit more comfortable in taking time to make things just perfect.
Mozilla originally slated Firefox 3.6 to be released at the end of 2009, but that goal has now been moved to sometime in the first quarter of 2010, CNet reported. (Those adventurous and frothing at the mouth for 3.6 can run the public beta, which I've been doing solely for the Windows 7 Aero peek enhancements.)
The browser wars are now deeper than just Mozilla trying to wrestle market share away from Microsoft (though that is still the main goal). Now Firefox has to deal with speedy alternative Chrome from Google, which has just recently reached to Linux and Mac OS.
The competition from Google is helping to fuel innovation for Firefox 4, such as moving each tab into its own separate process and cleaning up the interface to maximize browser content area.
Here is one proposed interface change for Firefox 4 as compared to the current layout for 3.5:
Anyways, 3.6 Beta 5 runs solid on Win 7 x64 and Fedora x64. All my ad-ons work fine.
Minefield is the name of the development (trunk) version of Firefox, so it will always be (pre-)alpha. As for 3.6, the first alpha was in August and pre-alpha development has been ongoing since around the first few betas of 3.5/3.1 early this year. That's not two years by any stretch - even Firefox 3.0 is much less than two years old.
I agree that 64-bit support for Windows would be cool, but luckily it has been there for some time on Linux.
PS: "I want all of my apps to be 64 bit because 64 is a bigger number than 32" does not constitute a good reason.
http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/12/22/
The new 10.50 pre alpha snapshot with the new Javascript engine Carakan seems to be faster even then Chrome 4 beta!
Firefox has always had to long start up times for my tastes.
Coded properly, it could be a bit faster...
But, without 64bit Flash support (ADOBE!!!), how many are willing to use a 64bit browser?
I wonder why they are not taking it out of beta.
Problem with the 64bit IE is you can't use it for Windows Update. That's the only reason I ever use Internet Explorer, and I still have to use the 32bit version.
Especially now that we have monitors with very high resolution, now should be the time to start using up that extra space. I have a 1920x1200 monitor, so I rather have more options in from of me all the time instead of having to click 10,000 times to get to the option I am looking for.
I use OpenOffice, what I do is I open the most often used tools (dialogs), like the heading styles toolbar, or a color selection toolbox, and I leave it open on the side of the windows. I don't know if you can do that in Office, I have not used it for almost a decade now.
The stabler Chrome 3 version is useless to me since I can't use the plugins then!
Anybody else having the same real life experiences with chrome 4+plug ins compared to firefox 3.5.x?
cuase they are useless, they cant even get rid of the memory leak that fire fox has had since 3.0, so yeah 64bit will be too much for them to do, Nothing really chages, FF is usless and falling behind IE8 which i feel is cleaner, faster, more secure and better
http://i45.tinypic.com/qzq59l.png