Talk:Firefox/Roadmap

Firefox in 2010

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After Firefox 3.6 ships in January, the Firefox team has identified the following features to ship in Firefox in 2010 (not a comprehensive list, but the major user-facing focus points):

• Multi-process plugins (Flash crashes/instability don't bring down the browser)
• Transition to jetpack extensions
• New UI stuff: new Windows menu structure, platform integration
• Weave
• Updater v2.0: updates which don't interrupt the user
• More responsive UI (async I/O)
• Better startup time
• Integrated Developer Tools

There are two major release vehicles available for these features: a stability release in Q1, and a major feature release which will preview in June/July and ship later in the year.

In order that out of process plugins can get widespread testing while not disrupting our ability to ship regular security updates, a special project branch will track mozilla-1.9.2: weekly betas with multi-process plugins will allow for quick iteration and widespread testing.

Alternate Proposal: Firefox 3.7

In this alternate proposal, there is an intermediate release (Firefox 3.7) in June 2010 which is intended to be an unprompted (minor) update to Firefox 3.6. The purpose of this release is to ship web-facing features which are being prepared on mozilla-central, but are not good candidates for being backported to 1.9.2:

• D3D rendering on Windows
• multi-process tab rendering for Fennec, but not Firefox
• low-level debugger support
• HTML5 parser?
• Layers?

Alpha1: ASAP Branch+Beta: 25-Feb (no later than 4-March) Final: 23-June

Details: 1.9.2 branched on 2009/08/13. Up through Feb 25 that's 6.5 months. At 6 weeks stabilization per three months development, that's 13 weeks of stabilization, or about 3 months. That puts stabilization as done at late May if the branchpoint is Feb 25. A few weeks for slack, and we get our late-June final.