Firefox 2.0/3.0 Roadmap
Ben Goodger (7/20/2005)
Introduction
Firefox will be one of the most critical delivery vehicles for Gecko and XULRunner technology in 2005. Our goal is to continue to build a "best of breed" browser product for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. We have ambitious goals for the workload between now and our next major release set. This document is a description of our current thinking on how we intend to get to Firefox 2.0. At this stage it is brief, but over time it will grow much as the 1.0 roadmap did.
Structure
We are planning for a Firefox 2.0 and 3.0, but will divide the planned work over (at this point) three major Milestones, 1.5 (September 2005), 2.0 (unscheduled) and 3.0 (unscheduled). All major development work will be done on the Mozilla trunk, and these releases will coincide with Gecko version revs.
Milestone Plan
This is, as always, subject to change.
| Milestone | Release Date | Bugs | Summary | |
| 1.0 | Phoenix | 2004-11-9 | Bugs + - ? | Inaugural Release |
| 1.0.1 | Rose & Crown | 2005-02-24 | Security Update | |
| 1.0.2 | 2005-03-20 | Security Update | ||
| 1.0.3 | 2005-04-15 | Security Update | ||
| 1.0.4 | 2005-05-11 | Security Update | ||
| 1.0.5 | 2005-07-12 | Security Update | ||
| 1.0.6 | 2005-07-19 | API Compatibility Update | ||
| 1.0.7 | 2005-09-20 | Security Update | ||
| 1.1a1 | Deer Park Alpha 1 "Strippenkaart" |
2005-05-31 | Bugs | Non-Feature Complete developer preview release |
| 1.1a2 | Deer Park Alpha 2 | 2005-07-12 | Bugs | Non-Feature Complete developer preview release |
| 1.4 | Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 | 2005-09-08 | Bugs | Feature Complete general preview release |
| 1.4.1 | Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 | 2005-10-06 | Bugs | Feature Complete general preview release |
| 1.5 | Firefox 1.5 "Deer Park" |
??? 2005 | Bugs | New Gecko, ongoing HIG compliance, sw/update and extension manager improvements. |
| 2.0 | "The Ocho" | 2006 | Bugs | The Next Big Thing™ |
| 3.0 | ??? | Bugs | The Next Next Big Thing™ | |
Dates are, as always, subject to change and represent our collective view of the state of the set of work remaining to be done at the time this document is updated.
... visually, the 1.5 plan looks something like this:
(note that the dates in this diagram are incorrect)
On Naming...
After some discourse, we have settled on the following naming structure for our releases going forward:
- Each major release has a code name (e.g. 1.5 is "Deer Park")
- The alpha releases are named “<codename> alpha”
- The public beta release is named Firefox 1.5 beta
- The final release is named “Firefox <version>”
Alpha releases are testing milestones and do not represent what we intend to ship as final. They may contain missing features, numerous bugs, etc. They are intended for our developer and testing community to work with to build upon and provide us with early feedback in the event major changes need to happen before the final release.
Beta releases are feature-complete and represent a rough idea of what we'd like to ship. These are for a more general early-adopter/testing audience that wants to see what the next release of Firefox is going to look like so that they can provide us with feedback on the most important issues to fix before the final release.
Release Candidates are facsimiles of what we intend to ship under any of the above categories or the final release itself. We usually post these a few days or weeks ahead of the release in question, to see if there are any critical bugs present that must be fixed. If there are none, we ship the release candidate as "final".
Please Note! Alpha releases are not for general consumption and may crash, delete your bookmarks, your profile, your hard disk, etc. They are very little more than a blessed Nightly Build. Preview Release builds may also suffer bugs and should be downloaded only by people willing to test pre-release software.
On Release Dates...
Dates shown above are tentative and serve only to give you an idea of the relative position of one release from another. They represent our current state of thinking as to the release dates at the time this document was last updated, and may have changed since then.
Goals
We are still working on goals for 2.0/3.0 and are drafting a PRD for its development. Some likely goals include:
- Improvements to Bookmarks/History
- Per-Site Options
- Enhancements to the Extensions system, Find Toolbar, Software Update, Search and other areas.
- Accessibility compliance
- More ... ?
(Note: placing an item on this list does not mean it will not be complete until 2.0/3.0, rather we would like to be done by 2.0/3.0, it may be implemented by 1.5, 2.0 or 3.0)
Localization
As with 1.0, all releases moving forward will be available in as many languages as can be made ready at the time of release. Localizers and others dependent on release timing should use this document as an indicator of the up-to-date release time.
Marketing
Marketing remains an important part of our strategy. The focus of our community marketing initiatives can be found at SpreadFirefox. In addition to this we will continue to develop our own marketing materials.
Branding (tentative)
Firefox 1.5 etc will be referred to as "Mozilla Firefox". Firefox 2.0 will be called "Mozilla Firefox 2". Detailed version information will be displayed in the About box.
Support Network
Firefox has a tremendous community following, and we wish to highlight the following two sites - Firefox Help for a huge amount of helpful Firefox-related information; and MozillaZine Forums - our premier discussion site for users and developers.