Firefox 3.7 Dropped In Favor of Feature Updates

Barence sends in a report from pcpro.co.uk that says "Under its original plans, Mozilla would roll out Firefox 3.6 and 3.7 over the course of 2009, each bringing minor improvements to the browser. However, a steady stream of delays to Firefox 3.6 has rendered that goal unobtainable, forcing Mozilla to rethink its release. As a result, Firefox 3.7 has been dropped and will be replaced with feature updates for Firefox 3.6 that will be rolled out with security updates. This should free up the team to work on the next major release, Firefox 4, slated for the last quarter of 2010, which is expected to follow the same development process." Updated 20100116 00:54 GMT by timothy: Alexander Limi, from Firefox User Experience, says that the PC Pro article linked above misinterprets the situation, and that 3.7 is still on the roadmap before 4.0. The confusion stems from a schedule realignment: the out-of-process plugins feature, originally slated to land in 3.7, will instead ship as a minor update in Firefox's 3.6 series. According to Limi, CNET gets it right."

Deja vu, I predict

[Anonymous Coward]

This should free up the team to work on the next major release, Firefox 4, slated for the last quarter of 2010, which is expected to follow the same development process.

Firefox will be dead before it hits version 5.0 [wikipedia.org].

Quick date calculations

[dark_panda]

"Mozilla would roll out Firefox 3.6 and 3.7 over the course of 2009, each bringing minor improvements to the browser. However, a steady stream of delays to Firefox 3.6 has rendered that goal unobtainable."

[jay@gobstopper ~]% date
Fri 15 Jan 2010 12:32:18 EST

... ... Okay guys, looks like this math checks out. It seems that releasing Firefox 3.6 and 3.7 in 2009 is an unobtainable goal at this point in time. You know, in 2010.

Re:Gecko 1.9.3 and SVG animation

[BZ]

> I just tried it using 3.5.7.

> I figured since 3 through 7 didn't match up

Interesting. Tests 3 through 7 all match up here in Firefox 3.5.7. On Window, Linux, and Mac, on several different hardware and VM configurations. What's special about your setup?

> I should point out that proper font rendering is required for EVERY test.

Sure. That's not the same thing as SVG Fonts, which are a font format for defining font data in SVG instead of using the fonts installed on your system. Whether SVG fonts are important is up for debate in the working group at the moment, in fact. ;)

> the composition test fails, gradient tests fail, fill tests fail, event handling and
> scripting is pointless in firefox

If you mean the one feComposite test for "the composition test", I can confirm that this fails. The gradient and fill tests pass fine for me. The event tests that are testing stuff that deals with the Core DOM pass fine. The ones that are testing stuff like onfocusin that SVG made up aren't implemented by pretty much anyone last I checked and are slated to be dropped from the SVG spec. The struct-dom tests pass fine over here.

> structured image placement, text selection doesn't work, inheritance is broken,

Not sure which tests you're looking at here.

> text alignment is broken beyond belief.

A lot of that looks unimplemented, yes.

> Gecko hasn't passed any tests,

Again, I'd like to know what's special about your system (or your profile, or your exact Firefox binary) here. If you're willing to take the time, can you run your Firefox in safe mode and see whether it's still failing tests 3-7? If so, where did you download your Firefox from?

And just to make sure, is "svg.enabled" set to true in your about:config?