With 3.7, expect an upgrade that lets people switch among active tabs by typing in the bar.įirefox 3.7 also will mark the arrival of some significant changes to the user interface, though final details remain under discussion. With version 3.0, Mozilla introduced Firefox's "awesomebar," officially but infrequently called the Smart Location Bar, which can be used not only to type addresses but also to retrieve the URLs of previously visited sites. And pushing the direction in which Chrome and Safari have been so aggressive, there will be new JavaScript work. The new design also should help split Firefox up into separate tasks that can take better advantage of all the computing threads offered by multicore processors.Īlso coming in 3.7 will be new graphical animation work using Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), two Web standards. "We've seen more crashing since 3.5 came out, especially in last month or so," Lilly said, pointing to problems from Web-based malware attacks and from issues with Flash.
Aero Peek lets people see miniature versions of applications from the Windows task bar Jump Lists spring up from applications on the task bar to let people take quick actions such as opening a recently used document or Web page.Ī mock-up of Firefox 3.7 shows merged reload-stop button, the home tab, and the missing menu bar option.įor 3.7, the big change will be under the covers: plug-ins such as Flash will be moved to computing processes that are separate from the main browser operation, protecting the latter from problems with the former.
"Aero Peek has landed in 3.6, but Jump Lists and download status in the Windows 7 task bar will have to wait for 3.7," according to this week's update. Support for new Windows 7 interface features, though, mostly will have to wait. New tabs generally will appear immediately to the right of the active tab when opened from a link, rather than at the far right of the tab strip.įinally, Firefox 3.6 will support Open Web Font, a font format that supports compression and metadata to let the origins of a typeface be tracked down. Tabs behavior will get a significant change that could throw some people off. The goal is to speed up multipage restarts of the browser.
Under the covers but more noticeable is prioritized networking that gives the active tab the lion's share of network capacity to speed its loading.
It's about as cosmetic as a change can be, but reskinning software often is popular among users who want to personalize their computers. One of the big changes with 3.6 is building in the Personas add-on that lets people customize the appearance of the browser. "We're trying to shrink these development cycles down," Shaver said. Version 3.6 is slated for release in final form this year, with 3.7 in the first half of next year and 4.0 about a year from now, Lilly said. The present version of Firefox was to have been called 3.1, but with significant new features, it became Firefox 3.5-and arrived later than 3.1 had been planned. Mike Shaver, vice president of engineering at Mozilla And the company has an aggressive schedule, with three releases due within about a year. Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of product development, and John Lilly, Mozilla's chief executive, detailed some of the browser's future in an interview at the corporation's headquarters here. But what exactly is coming in the new version and its successors?
Mozilla plans to release the first beta version of 3.6 this weekend or early next week. MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.-Some new fruits of Mozilla's effort to speed Firefox development are about to arrive.