Firefox: new version planned for December as browser celebrates fifth birthday
Firefox 3.6, the latest version of the web browser, which marks its fifth birthday today,should be available by early December.
Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, told The Telegraph that the final version of the newest update, should be ready to release by early December and could even be available by the end of this month.
The new release will see the ‘Personas’ feature, which allows users to customise the look and feel of the browser’s user interface and main toolbars, become an official part of the offering and not just an add-on. Firefox 3.6 users will be able to add images and colours to the browser’s interface, tabs and toolbars. It is also improving its compatibility with add-on developers. The latest version is available in beta at the moment.
Mr Nitot said the aim was release updates more frequently. “We are trying to release an update every six months. Users will see less big changes from version to version but there will updates out more regularly,” he explained.
The not-for-profit branch of parent company, Mozilla, also celebrates its fifth birthday today. On November 9 2004, 12 developers determined to create an alternative to Microsoft’s monopolistic Internet Explorer 6 browser, launched Firefox 1.0. There have been five more versions released since then – with the most recent, Firefox 3.5, delivering a major spike in the browser’s users.
In 2004, Microsoft and according to Mr Nitot, had even disbanded its Internet Explorer development team because there were no potential rivals on the horizon to counter its dominance.
“Five years ago, the future was quite gloomy for the web and web browsers. At the time Microsoft’s IE6 was the only browser being used by everyone and Microsoft had disbanded its IE development team. The whole world was building websites for a browser that wasn’t being developed anymore.
“We were upset by this so work on Firefox 1.0 began”
According to Net Applications, Firefox now accounts for 24 per cent share of the global browser market. Internet Explorer is still used by the majority of web users with a 64.5 per cent share and Apple’s browser Safari takes third position with 4 per cent.
Mr Nitot said Firefox has 330 million active users and is currently being downloaded 1.5 million times a day.
Since Firefox’s launch, Microsoft has released two more updated versions of its browser, IE7 and IE8, and Google entered the web browser market with Chrome.
Despite only having a 3.6 per cent global share of the browser market, this could be set to change with the pending launch of Google OS – its own operating system. Mr Nitot admits this could present a threat to Firefox. “To some extent it could have an effect on Firefox, but we have time. Google Chrome OS isn’t set to launch for a couple of years and it is more of a battle between Microsoft and Google. The goals of Google and goals of Mozilla, are pretty well aligned at the moment.”
Content courtesy of The Telegraph
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