In a rather sudden move, the company Mozilla, well known for its Firefox browser, has gone and removed version 3.7 of its software from the development schedule. At the same time, the company has revamped the entire process which it uses to develop software.
According to Computerworld, an interview with Mozilla"s director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner, has revealed that instead of releasing major updates a couple of times a year (with patch updates in between), they will now do regular feature & security upgrades, with the biggest updates (*.0) being much rarer. This means that you can expect to see new features in the browser every "four to six weeks", as opposed to four to six months. Firefox 3.7, intended to be released in the second quarter of this year, will now just be another regular update for the browser, followed by 4.0 at the end of this year (which will be the major one).
Beltzner believes that Mozilla"s progress is slowed by the way they currently update Firefox, as there"s a much higher chance of getting struck with show-stopping bugs if many features are introduced at once. The first update in the new format is dubbed "Lorentz", and will mean that each of Firefox"s plug-ins will run in a separate process, helping reduce crashes and errors. Of course, the biggest upgrades, such as Mozilla"s planned user interface overhaul, would still go through the beta and RC process as updates do currently.
On the note of Firefox 3.6, expect it to see a final release on either January 19 or 26; the proper date hasn"t been officially announced yet, though those two turned up in Mozilla"s meeting notes.