Mozilla bumps Firefox from 3.1 to 3.5

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 10 Mar 2009 at 09:25

Mozilla has confirmed that the much-delayed Firefox 3.1 will now become Firefox 3.5, to reflect the amount of work that's been poured into the release.

Firefox 3.1 was originally intended to be a quick release, packaging a few of the features that didn't make it into Firefox 3. The company now says the original designation sells the browser short.

"The increase in scope represented by TraceMonkey [Firefox's new Javascript engine] and Private Browsing, plus the sheer volume of work that's gone into everything from video and layout to places and the plugin service make it a larger increment than we believe is reasonable to label 3.1," says Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox on the developer's blog.

"3.5 will help set expectations better about the amount of awesome that's packed into Shiretoko, and we expect uptake help from that as well."

In saying this, Beltzner was keen to point out that the bump in version number represented the amount of work that had already gone into the release, rather than an indication that more features will be packed in.

Mozilla will officially adopt the new version number when it releases the fourth beta of the browser. Beta 4 is currently slated to ship on 14 April.

The fourth beta was a late addition to the release schedule and introduced so the company could get beta 3 out of the door, despite the raft of bugs afflicting TraceMonkey.