Andre Yoskowitz
9 Apr 2011 15:40
Facing ever-increasing competition from Google's Chrome and even Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla has announced that it will be moving to a more aggressive timetable for its Firefox browser, with Firefox 5 expected before June 21st.
Firefox 4 was released just last month, after over a year of development and delays.
Even more shockingly, Mozilla expects to release Firefox 6 just 60 days later, at the end of August.
Following in Chrome's footsteps, Mozilla is moving to a faster development cycle. Despite being released in 2008, Chrome is already in version 11 (beta for users) and version 12 (beta for developers).
Chrome uses four-channels to continually add features to Chrome, "nightly," "dev," "beta" and "stable." Because of this, there is a new version of Chrome (usually) every two months.
CW explains what Mozilla will need to do to meet the tight deadlines: "Mozilla will add features to Firefox as it goes. If a feature is not ready for the first of the four channels -- what the company calls "nightlies" as well as "Mozilla central" -- it will not be added later to the aurora or beta builds. Features with problems will be backed out of an edition -- say Firefox 5 -- and deferred until the next in line."
NetApplications reveals browser market share as follows: Internet Explorer at 56 percent, Firefox at 21.80 percent and Chrome at 11.57 percent.