A few months ago Mozilla announced that the organization will only continue to support version 1.5.0.x of the browser through late April. The information came via a security update for both Firefox 1.5 and 2.0, with an extra note saying that the older version will be “maintained with security and stability updates until April 24, 2007.” After that date Firefox 1.5 will no longer receive updates from Mozilla and all remaining users should upgrade to Firefox 2 if they want to keep receiving updates to the browser.

To keep it interesting, Firefox 3.0 is already well into Alpha (version 5 comes out next week), Beta 1 is expected in July of 2007, and they have posted an estimated release of November on their roadmap. You can get more details from the release schedule posted on the Mozilla website. Curious what they are up to? So were we. Mozilla has a site just for us developers stating some of what’s new. Some cool css improvements, a move to javascript 1.8, support for regular expressions, and much more.

Cross-Browser Compatibility: How Many Can YOU Juggle?

Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Safari, Opera … well you get the point.

I have to admit, that as a web developer, trying to keep up with all these versions and maintain cross-browser compatibility is down right exhausting. I highly appreciate the auto-update feature, though I honestly wish it would also push people up to the next full version. From our perspective, imagine a world where everyone was on the same version of Firefox and Internet Explorer! Of course, it might be a nightmare when all the sites we are responsible for explode into a million pieces on every major auto-update. If they handed out a developer tester pre-release version so that we could run around and catch all the bugs before the official upgrade date though, that might be acceptable. Point being, oh great gods of browser development, please help us poor web developers out just a little. Some consistency, and if not, at least minimize the number of platforms we have to bow down to.

Online & Offline Applications

According to an article in PC Magazine:

If development goes according to plan, this will be the first version of Firefox—or of any browser, for that matter—to have the three key components needed to support offline Web applications: DOM Storage; an offline execution model; and synchronization. That critical foundation will let free or low-cost Web suites compete with Microsoft software and possibly break the company’s decades-long domination in office productivity apps.

Sounds neat. Of course, if Adobe could just get Apollo stabilized, we would already have that ability. I have to wonder how Firefox will deliver? I also am extremely curious as to how this new generation of applications will deal with security. After all, having something that can read and write from local files while having the freedom to make calls to and download from the Internet is a constant security risk.

Oh My God … Standards You Say?

So what else? According to a post at arstechinca:

The reflow improvements in Gecko 1.9 (included in the latest Gran Paradiso nightly build, but not the alpha release) finally enable Firefox to pass the Acid 2 test, a CSS test case developed by the Web Standards Project to illuminate flaws in HTML/CSS rendering engines. To pass the Acid 2 test, browsers must comply with W3C standards and provide support for a wide variety of features that are considered relevant by web designers. The Acid 2 test has been passed by several other browsers, including Safari, Konqueror, and Opera, but not Internet Explorer. Passing Acid 2 is considered to be a significant milestone in Firefox development.

Oohhh, standards. Ok, that would be a nice change. If only Microsoft would follow suit.

Mac Users Get Some Loving

Oh and you Mac users will be excited: they seem to be spending significant cycles on making sure the Macintosh version will get the attention it needs.

Firefox Learns How to Share a Little Better

Ever notice that once you have about 10 or so tabs open Firefox becomes a horrid memory hog and eats a bunch of your ram? Heck mine even crashes every so often. Well worry no more, Firefox 3 has supposedly resolved this issue.

Places Everybody…

Next we have Places, the revamped bookmark tool that was dropped from 2.0 development. Places will store both bookmarks and browsing history in a database that users will be able to search for sites they want to revisit. As far as browsers go, bookmarks and [browsing] history haven’t changed much since the get go, so anything is probably an improvement.

Private Mode, PDFs that Behave, Cross-Session Downloads, and More…

All that and a few more cool things to boot:

• A private web browsing mode. I guess this would mean no cache, history, password, or entered form information storage.
• Save web pages as PDF files, integrated with history. That would be just awesome.
• Support pause/resume downloads across sessions.

Download and Try Firefox 3 Alpha

For the Brave and Daring: Firefox 3.0 Alpha Release . That said, Mozilla ( and I) suggests you stay on FF2 for all legitimate development.

Version 4

hehhe .. need more, well no fear, because there is already info on Version 4!

According to Wikipedia, planning is in progress for Mozilla 2.0, the platform on which Firefox 4.0 is likely to be based. These changes include improving and removing XPCOM APIs, switching to standard C++ features, just-in-time compilation with JavaScript 2 (known as the Tamarin project), and tool-time and runtime security checks.