In ten days, Mozilla is going to release Firefox 14 to the release channel, Firefox 15 to the beta channel, Firefox 16 to Aurora, and move the Nightly channel to Firefox 17. What can users expect from these releases? This is what I'm trying to find out in this little guide to the next versions of the Firefox web browser.
Keep in mind that changes may happen during development, so that some features may not make it in the version that Mozilla intents to release them for.
Before we start, I'd like to quickly write down the release dates of the coming versions so that you know when the new versions are going to hit the channel of the browser that you are working with.
Firefox 15
Firefox 16
Firefox 17
When you look at the features page you will notice that the majority of features are not listing a target Firefox version yet. Since some of them sound really cool, I'd like to list them here so that you know what's also coming your way in the future:
Are you a Firefox user? If you are, is there a particular feature that you are most interested in?
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Firefox Dev : Everybody hates Firefox updates
…..Credit where it’s due: the way Google handled Chrome updates was very, very smart. They recognized that updates are one of the hardest things to get right, so they solved that problem first, before releasing version 1. The first release of Chrome was little more than an empty box of a browser, but it was wrapped around an excellent updating system. This let them gradually transform that empty box into a full-featured browser, without the users ever realizing they were getting updates….
..Ironically, by doing rapid releases poorly, we just made Firefox look like an inferior version of Chrome. And by pushing a never-ending stream of updates on people who didn’t want them, we drove a lot of those people to Chrome; exactly what we were trying to prevent.
We assumed our users loved Firefox enough that they would put up with the irritation of updates in order to have a better product…
http://evilbrainjono.net/blog?showcomments=true&permalink=1094
Firefox 14 will move to Release channel on July 17, not the 27th.
Upsa, you are right, corrected.
The only thing that seems interesting there is the In-browser translation.
The social integration is more than bloat. I don’t want that shit in my browser.
Have to agree with you there. Something like that would be best left to an add-on. Putting it in the browser means extra code that I’m not going to use. That is the definition of bloat.
And Chrome 21 beta just added a “Kinect” like getUserMedia API which activates Camera and Mic let the users control application, Games… with hand movements with no need for plug-ins.
check : http://www.soundstep.com/blog/experiments/jsdetection/
and in Firefox as well (some of these future version)
But they still can’t put in a bookmark sidebar …. o,O
P.S Flash in Chrome 21 id FULLY sandboxed :
“Today’s Chrome 21 beta release has *fully* sandboxed Flash on *all* versions of Windows,” Schuh, a member of Google’s security team, said on Twitter yesterday.
That’s great. I also read that you soon get to change Flash settings in Chrome and no longer on the Adobe website.
Currently using Firefox UX 16.0a1, with daily updates, so looking forward to future developments!!
The promised improved features look interesting, for sure! :)
Might worth to mention that according to the linked Wiki page Hang detector and reporter won’t be available in the release builds anytime soon since it relies on data that compiled into the nightly testing builds only…
Thanks for the article Martin.
Q: Is “Panel based download manager” same as “Download Statusbar” add-on ?
No, it is an icon in one of the upper toolbars.
I look forward to Firefox releases.
I recently switched to Firefox ESR on our (about 200) clients …
The way Firefox is spreading releases is a PITA for every administrator!
Well, at least Mozilla updates it’s Browser(s) and patches the bugs very fast, unlike IE who. after so many years is still buggy and has more security holes than a sieve!
No ActiveX in Firefox!! :)
Best to be safe than sorry, I always say!
I’m interested only in performance and memory consumption improvements.
How about Pdf Viewer almost fully funcional?
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/15.0a2/auroranotes/
The most important patch for performance improvements is the one that landed in bug 695480.
This means that add-ons will no longer suffer from memory leaks.
Memory problems in the Firefox browser have been fixed about 6 months now. It’s got to the point where there aren’t really any issues worth talking about.
Part of the reason Firefox still has a reputation for being a memory hog is the fact that the add-ons leak memory. Most people won’t realise this and continue to blame Firefox for the horrendous memory consumption, instead of the add-ons which aren’t built by Mozilla.
This single fix resolves all those problems with countless add-ons, so the effect will be that perceived Firefox memory problems will vanish for anyone using Firefox 15 or higher.
Thing is, this fix isn’t even on the ‘major new features’ list, and so not many people are talking about it. The effect however will be massive. Everything else is simply icing on the cake of this and other performance related bugs.
Regarding Firefox.
Wonder if today’s Flash Player 11.3.300.265 update fixed those Firefox crashes.
Firefox improves with every version,the only thing I don’t want to happen is broken addons,hope that those,Firefox 4,5,6 addon non-compatibility,days are long gone!
Firefox ESR 17 will be released at the same time as the “regular” Firefox 17. Hence the same major version number:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:Proposal#Proposal
The ESR 10.0.X versions no longer match the proposal because of unplanned security/stability updates (10.0.1 & 10.0.2)
Chris you are right, have corrected the issue.
I hate the inline autocomplete in the address bar, it’s really annoying.
Please Mozilla, don’t sacrifice the development of Thunderbird just because you need more developer resources for Firefox and Firefox OS.
The email client has come a long way. With continued improvement, one day it will be a viable replacement for Outlook. Once that happens, the last fig leaf covering Microsoft’s nakedness falls off.
You have a beautiful thing in your hands, please don’t give up now.
Hmm, I thought FFox 14 was supposed to be the ‘big’ update, not version 15. Oh well it’ll come soon enough.
You mentioned that the social features look like they’ll be optional, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not loaded & present to slow the browser down, just that we can opt to use the bloat or not. I think that the developers have forgotten that this was supposed to be a nimble anti-bloatware browser that lets the users choose features by adding extensions, or that a lot of those users have old computers.
I’ve been using Firefox since it was 3-4 months old, but if the future versions are half as slow on my computer as I suspect they will be, I’ll have to abandon it. Hopefully a few talented coders will react to the Firefox Future Bloat List by forking a lightweight Mozilla-based browser project to add compatibility with Firefox extensions; the result would probably be more popular than Firefox within the year.
bandwidth control for each tab, even for the whole window like Opera Turbo.
“One Click” start menu: configuration option to start entries without sub menus, i.e. “last closed tabs/windows”. Even as a transparent layer over window. No more “OK”-/Close-Buttons. Optional (configuration): Even no more warnings with blocking window and OK-/Close-Buttons, better with buttons, but automatic fade out after xy seconds.