A Firefox roadmap update [LWN.net]

July 27, 2005

This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier.

The Mozilla Foundation is shaking up its roadmap a little -- though not "scrapping" the 1.1 release as had been reported in some outlets. The 1.1 release was originally planned for this month, but that has been changed to a 1.5 release planned for September. Chris Hofmann, Mozilla's director of engineering, talked to us about the change in the roadmap, and what's ahead for Firefox and Thunderbird.

Hofmann said that the version number change was made for a number of reasons:

[The change] is partly technical, one of the features that is going into this next release is a software updating feature, so we were able to do a better job of testing incremental updates with this software update feature. As we move up the numbering scale, and make sure that all of that detection and ability to deal with numbering changes works with part of the software update system and more importantly, recognizes the progress that we've made in the last six months getting a number of features into the product that we hadn't expected to be there and this far along.

Firefox developer Asa Dotzler also wrote about the change:

One major consideration in this decision was the sheer volume of changes in the Firefox core (Gecko) made a minor .1 increment seem misleading. While it may not be obvious by looking simply at release dates, today's Gecko core of Firefox has seen nearly 16 months worth of changes compared to what shipped in Firefox 1.0. This is because we created our Gecko 1.7 branch (the branch from which Firefox 1.0 shipped) back in April of 2004. At that time, Gecko development on the trunk continued and very little of that work was carried over to the 1.7 branch to be included in Firefox 1.0.

Indeed, there are quite a few new features and other changes in Firefox 1.5, many of which we covered on LWN with the first Deer Park Alpha release. The 1.5 release should have improvements in pop-up blocking, tab reordering, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) support and ECMAScript for XML (E4X) support.

One of the improvements that Hofmann highlighted for 1.5 is Firefox's extensions system. According to Hofmann, the 1.5 release will handle versioning information of extensions and "ability for the browser to recognize extensions that might be incompatible with specific releases." Hofmann also said that this release would allow the user to turn extensions on and off, something that the Firefox 1.0 does not allow -- though some extensions, like Greasemonkey do provide that feature directly.

The 1.0 to 1.5 jump will also bring about some changes to the Firefox API, which may affect extensions that work with the current interface.

There's a pretty big shift in the API set for applications and extensions that are moving from 1.0 to 1.5, most of the extension authors have taken the work to make extensions that are going to be compatible with 1.5. There might be a few more changes we make in the next few weeks of the development cycle, but by the time we get to 1.5 release, the goal is to have a very large percentage of the extensions available be compatible with that release.

Thunderbird is also being shifted from a 1.1 release to a 1.5 release around the same time frame as Firefox. Hofmann said that the version bump for Thunderbird was, in part, because development had been moving along nicely for Thunderbird as well -- but also because the Mozilla Foundation is trying to keep version numbers for both applications in sync. He noted that Thunderbird 1.5 would have improvements in spam detection and for detecting phishing attacks, in-line spell checking and improved RSS features. Thunderbird 1.5 will also feature improvements for updates, and users should be able to do updates from Thunderbird directly.

Though the feature sets are sketchy at this point, the Mozilla Foundation's roadmap calls for a Firefox 2.0 release in early 2006 and a Firefox 3.0 by the end of 2006. One feature that Hofmann talked about for future releases is Xul Runner. According to Hofmann, Xul Runner will allow Firefox, Thunderbird and other applications "to share core components of technology." According to Hofmann, any one of the Mozilla applications would include the core features, and then users would only need to download "a thin layer" for additional applications.

Hofmann said that the first instance of Xul Runner would be available "around the time we ship Firefox 1.5," and that the next versions of Firefox and Thunderbird would be built on top of Xul Runner and "allow sharing of common code" that both applications use.

Given the amount of time 1.5 has been in development (Firefox 1.0 was released in November, 2004) it seems a bit ambitious to plan the 2.0 and 3.0 releases in 2006. However, anything is possible. Meanwhile, the Firefox 1.5 Beta is scheduled for August, and a second alpha release is available now for brave souls who can't wait for new features, or who are eager to help in testing.

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