Mozilla Accelerates Firefox 5 Release Schedule

conceivablytech.com

13 points·peternorton··7 comments

> The total is 18 weeks, if our math is correct, even if Mozilla says we should expect new Firefox releases every 6 – 12 weeks, which we can’t quite follow.

The total development time for a version is 18 weeks, but there will be several versions worked on in parallel. In other words, when one version is in beta, another is in experimental and so forth.

So in theory a release is possible every 6 weeks. However, a decision might be made to not release (depending on open bugs) and wait for the next window, which would make it 12 weeks.

Best set your extensions for maxversion "22" at this rate.

I'm still moving along happily with 3.6.17 until the extension developers get all their kinks out and someone invents a more perfect/compatible statusbar replacement.

Only extensions I had that weren't updated for FF4 were ones that were just not being actively developed anyway (eg, the Delicious plugin). It was probably time to drop those anyway.

FF4 has tons of improvements, I'm incredibly glad I updated despite a bit of a rough transition.

I hope they fix the blurry font rendering in Firefox 4 under Windows 7 (when hardware acceleration is not switched off).

Odd, hardware acceleration is on in my Win7 and I didn't notice anything.

If you've also got Firefox 3.6 or Chrome installed, compare the rendering side-by-side and you should see the difference.

There is also http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/791489 and some other web pages reporting this problem.

After reading that, I double-checked, and I do see the rendering problem in some sites - I don't use Windows much, luckily.

Looks like for most people the problem is that FF4 is now using direct2d DirectWrite for font rendering where available, and DirectWrite has some issues.

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