According to a posting over at Softpedia, it seems Mozilla is going to speed up the pace of Firefox major versions akin to that of Google Chrome, which is currently on developer version 10.x since it became widely available in September 2008.
This means that users could be running Firefox 5.0 only months after the final of Firefox 4.0 is made available. Brendan Eich, co-founder of mozilla.org and the CTO of Mozilla, made the closing remark in the first Weekly Engineering Newsletter.
Eich noted, “Cast a colder eye on your blockers. Some of them can wait for a dot release or Firefox 5 that I do believe will be only months after 4 comes out. We are going to a fast release cycle. It serves our users better. To do that we have to get this touch and go done with Firefox 4.” At the time of writing there are some 90 blockers that need to be resolved before Firefox 4 can be released, which is currently at Beta 9 with pre Beta 10 builds going out daily.
“Some of those blockers are, and I have some, soft in the sense that they"re edge cases. We probably can wait on those. We"re not going to kick them out yet because if we have the parallel bandwidth of all our great people and the volunteer community too where we have volunteers doing some of this work, we"ll take a fix if it"s an additive and safe fix.
“But at some point we have to stop that. I think we"re past that point and I"m going to treat my bugs accordingly and I encourage everyone here to do that,” Eich added.
Mozilla Firefox 4.0 is expected to release sometime in February 2011.