Mozilla has set an aggressive schedule for the next version of Firefox, slating the release of Firefox 5 for June 21st.
If it meets that schedule, Mozilla could crank out Firefox 6 just two months later.
The change is a great shift for the open-source company, which has been locked into a much longer schedule. Firefox 4, e.g , was in development for more than a year, while Firefox 3.6 took about the same time to finish.
Google uses a similar process to continually feed features to Chrome, relying on a four-channel line of development: nightly, dev, beta and stable. The result is a new version of Chrome every five to eight weeks.
According to information posted on Mozilla's site , its new, faster development will match Google's.
Mozilla is currently planning a truncated schedule for Firefox 5, which should ship June 21st. To meet that deadline, Firefox 5 has to hit the "aurora" channel April 12 and reach beta by May 17.
With Firefox 5 done, Mozilla will shift to a standard 18-week schedule that will put Firefox 6's release around mid of August.
To meet those dates, Mozilla will add features to Firefox as it goes. If a feature is not ready for the first of the four channels -- what the company calls "nightlies" as well as "Mozilla central" -- it will not be added later to the aurora or beta builds. Features with problems will be backed out of an edition -- say Firefox 5 -- and deferred until the next in line.
Google essentially does the same with Chrome.
Mozilla will apparently also stop shipping interim security updates as of Firefox 5, and instead patch vulnerabilities as fixes are crafted, with the final Firefox build given priority.
The only exception will be emergency security updates, which Mozilla calls "chemspills." Those will land simultaneously on all four channels, and result in an emergency update to the beta and release lines.
Ideally, Mozilla's new plan will update the beta channel every week, the nightly and aurora channels every day, and the Firefox build every six weeks.
Key to the new plan is a "silent update" mechanism in Firefox that automatically upgrades the browser to each new version as they're completed. Chrome is the only browser that now updates in the background without notifying the user or requiring any user action.
Mozilla has worked on silent updating on and off for months. Originally slated to ship with Firefox 4 , the feature was pulled from that version last fall. It must now make it into Firefox 5 in order for the rapid roll-out of Firefox 6, 7 and beyond to work smoothly.
"Chrome's development model has been a successful experiment in terms of getting production releases with improvements and new features out quickly and much faster than in the past.
