If you’re a Firefox user, you may have noticed it took quite a long time to get your hands on Firefox 4 (it was released March 22, 2011 and came almost 15 months after Firefox 3.6). That’s because Mozilla had quite a long development window. Compared to Google’s Chrome browser which releases a new version every six weeks, it seems like forever.
This is about to change, as Mozilla has adopted the same aggressive schedule as Google, in order to push out new features, speed enhancements and fixes quicker to the general public.
They are releasing their browsers in 4 different stages (or channels):
- Nightly – 100,000 users
- Aurora – 1,000,000 users
- Beta – 10,000,000 users
- Firefox Release – 100,000,000 users
It seems like each stage will take roughly 6+ weeks and this process allows Mozilla to stagger releases on a regular basis. We should expect 3 new releases from Mozilla this year. Expect Firefox 5 to be released sometime in July 2011 while Firefox 7 would be released by the end of the year!
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