Webware

Mozilla plans to issue a release candidate for Firefox 3.5 on Friday and the final version by the end of the month, Firefox director Mike Beltzner said Tuesday.

The browser, code-named Shiretoko, began its life as a modest 3.1 upgrade. But as Mozilla's ambitions expanded and other browsers such as Google Chrome exerted competitive pressure, the new Firefox was promoted to version 3.5 and its planned ship date slid back several months. You can grab the Firefox 3.5 beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Firefox 3.5 comes with a spate of new features--5,000 total, according to Mozilla. Among the major ones: built-in video; local storage to enable richer Web applications that can work even with no network connection; a private browsing mode; geolocation to aid Web pages that can benefit from knowing a user's location; and faster performance loading pages and executing Web-based JavaScript programs.

"We've added technology we think upgrades the Web itself," Beltzner said.

Mozilla squeezed in a post-beta-4, pre-RC1 Firefox update last week, and the official release candidate 1 will get mostly a handful of changes to correctly handle some unusual JavaScript situations correctly, Beltzner said. And because of Firefox's extensive beta-testing network--800,000 people use the beta versions--Mozilla expects that RC1 will be the sole release candidate.

"We're aiming the final release around the end of the month," Beltzner said.

Firefox trails only Internet Explorer in market share, and Mozilla says its use is growing fast.

(Credit: Net Applications)

Update 12 p.m. PDT: Other features in Firefox 3.5 include support for Web workers, which can enable browser-based applications to run in the background; personas to more easily provide themes; downloadable fonts; better built-in graphics technology through CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) standards; the ability to delete browsing traces for a recent period of time or specific Web site; and built-in support for the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) technology for better communications between a browser and server.

What's after Firefox 3.5?
Mozilla has a number of improvements in mind for the successor to Firefox 3.5, code-named Namoroka, and Beltzner said programmers are eager to get 3.5 out so they can get cracking.

One is a process isolation technology called Electrolysis that should help protect Firefox from crashes, said Damon Sicore, director of platform engineering. Competing browsers' process isolation can help keep the browser running even when one page or plug-in misbehaves, but Firefox today crashes in its entirety, employing the less graceful approach of trying to reopen the pages upon restart.

The first phase of Electrolysis will be to isolate plug-ins such as Adobe Systems' Flash so a problem won't crash the whole browser, Sicore said. "It's going faster than we expected. By the end of July we hope to have a prototype," a separate development version of Firefox where the technology can be tested, he said.

Next up for Electrolysis will be a broader isolation technology that separates the processes of tabs, he said. "The goal for that is somewhere around the end of year in prototype form," Sicore said.

Also in the future is a 64-bit version of Firefox for Mac OS X. "We have people working on that now, a 64-bit version on Mac OS X. The majority of that is supposed to be done by end of quarter," Sicore said. Again, loose deadline is for prototype work, not a production version.

Apple's new Snow Leopard operating system is fully 64-bit, including Safari, and Apple boasts that JavaScript runs much faster in the 64-bit version

Most Firefox add-ons should move easily to 64-bit versions, Beltzner said, unless they include binary software compiled specifically for 32-bit operating stems.

Though 64-bit Windows is now arriving, "It's not one of our supported-tier platforms," Beltzner said.

Firefox also plans to improve performance in Namoroka, including start-up time and user interface responsiveness.

Firefox in second place
Firefox broke the lock Microsoft's Internet Explorer had on the browser market, and now there's abundant competition. Apple's new Safari 4 works both on Mac OS X and Windows, Google's Chrome is advancing the performance agenda, and Opera is trying to advance the state of Web computing.

But Mozilla has a big leg up on other IE rivals. Based on the number of machines that ping Mozilla's servers, the organization estimates there are 300 million Firefox users worldwide--a major increase from the 175 million a year ago when Firefox 3.0 was released amid "Download Day" promotional fanfare. According to NetApplications, Firefox has 22.5 percent share, a number that Beltzner said corresponds reasonably well with Firefox's own measurements.

"Our growth has been steady and strong throughout the past year," Beltzner said.

One of Firefox's competitive advantages is an active community, not just the open-source coders who help Mozilla with the core programming but also vocal fans, translators, testers, and programmers who write add-ons. That community has been helpful in places like Poland, where Firefox has nearly 50 percent market share, and Indonesia, where it has the majority, Beltzner said.

Reports (like this one on The Apple Blog) persist that beta releases of the Mozilla Firefox 3 browser have rendered it a "perplexingly sluggish performer" on the Mac. Despite Mozilla's speed improvements in Minefield, those tweaks haven't seemed to make it into beta releases of Firefox 3.

Until now.

As an open-source Web browser, Firefox is, of course, open to community tinkering. One member of that Firefox community, Chris Latko, has developed his own version of Firefox 3.5 beta, dubbed Shiretoko, and my informal tests confirm what The Apple Blog and others have been saying: it's mucho fast.

What it's not, however, is compatible with all the add-ons/extensions I use with my latest production release of Firefox (3.0.10): AdBlock Plus, Fasterfox, etc. This, however, is to be expected: Shireteoko is beta software, after all.

At any rate, if you have an Intel-based Mac and you've been disturbed by the sluggishness of Mozilla's Firefox 3 beta releases, and were persuaded by CNET's Stephen Shankland's suggestion that Google's Chrome-on-Mac blows Firefox 3 beta 4 out of the water in speed tests, try Shiretoko.

It may keep you patiently waiting for the next great release from the Mozilla Firefox team, rather than looking for Google's allegedly greener Chrome grass.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Mozilla on Monday released beta 3.5 of Firefox, a revamp of the open-source Web browser designed to include better performance, several new Web programming features, and a private browsing mode.

The earlier betas had been numbered 3.1, but Mozilla switched to the version 3.5 name after concluding the changes were more significant than it envisioned earlier. Mozilla has said earlier the fourth beta will the last, with more polished release candidates expected before the final version of Firefox 3.5 is released. You can download Firefox 3.5 beta 4 from CNET Download.com for Windows and Mac.

The software emerges amid what's become a fiercely competitive browser market. Microsoft has released a significant new version, Internet Explorer 8, while Google has entered the market with Chrome and Apple is trying to secure a Windows foothold for its Safari browser. Firefox holds second place in market share to IE.

Among the changes compared with the current Firefox 3.0.x versions are the faster TraceMonkey engine for running Web sites' JavaScript programs; built-in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) technology for exchanging data between servers and browsers; support for tags to describe audio and video content the way images have been available for years; the private browsing mode for leaving no traces on your computer while surfing; support for technology to let permitted applications know the user's location; and support for the Web workers standard for letting a browser perform processing in the background without holding back a Web application's user interface.

There are a number of known problems with Gmail and with AVG SafeSearch v8.0 on Windows, and as usual, many of those extensions that are so popular on Firefox could break. For details, check the release notes.

Mozilla had planned to release its new "Shiretoko" version of Firefox in early 2009, but with the scale of changes made to the open-source browser, a date halfway through the year now looks more realistic.

After releasing Firefox 3.1 beta 3 last week, the organization behind the browser said a fourth beta is planned--and with the new version number 3.5.

"There are no plans for a Beta 5 at this time, and after Beta 4 we'll be looking to move to a release candidate," said Firefox director Mike Beltzner in a statement. "Of course, we stand by our commitment to ship software when it's ready."

So when might the final version of Firefox 3.5 be ready, with at least two more test versions planned? Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard offered a loose schedule in a Twitter post Friday. "Firefox 3.5 will be out once we do one more beta and some release candidates. No dates, but probably 2-3 months or so," Blizzard said.

It's always difficult to draw the line between freezing features to concentrate on stabilizing software and extending development time to add a bit more technology to the new version; Mozilla decided the latter path was the better one.

"The increase in version number is proposed due to the sheer volume of work, which makes Shiretoko feel like much more than a small, incremental improvement over Firefox 3: TraceMonkey, video tag and player support, improvements to user controls over data privacy, significant improvements in the web layout and rendering platform, and much more," Beltzner said in an earlier blog post about the Firefox version number change.

The browser wars are in full force, with Microsoft on the cusp of releasing the new Internet Explorer 8, Apple offering a beta of Safari 4, Opera trying to offer faster downloads and faster JavaScript in its product, and Google, the 800-pound Internet Gorilla, offering Chrome.

Changes in Firefox 3.5 include faster execution of Web-based JavaScript programs, a private browsing mode, native support for the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) technology for exchanging data between servers and browsers, and built-in audio and video abilities for bypassing Flash or other multimedia technologies.

Firefox 3.1 alpha 2, code-named Shiretoko, adds functionality for Web developers with very little eye candy for users.

Johnathan Nightingale of Mozilla described Firefox 3.1 as having more refinement than new features. This alpha release is intended for developers and testers only and should not yet be for general-purpose use.

The most visible enhancement in this alpha release is a feature that allows you to drag and drop tabs between two open Firefox browsers.

There are considerable under-the-hood enhancements here. Built on a pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering engine, Firefox 3.1 alpha 2 includes support for a video tag element in the HTML 5 standard, which allows designers to embed video directly into pages without using proprietary formats. It also includes support for CSS 2.1 and 3, further enhancing the browser's overall performance.

To make Javascript run faster, there is support for "Web workers," a threading process that allows scripts to run in parallel in the background.

For Windows Vista users there's a new Aero "glass" style for the Mozilla browser interface. This means that developers can write Web applications that will appear to be translucent on browsers running Windows Vista with Aero turned on.

The first public beta for Firefox 3.1 should be available in late September or early October. Final release will be in late 2008 or early 2009.

Firefox 3.1 alpha 2 is available from Mozilla.