Race of browsers: Firefox 9 will be ready in the end of the year

Last Friday Mozilla released beta release of Firefox 5, accelerating rates of release of the browser open source. The stable release of Firefox 5 is going to be released on June 21.

According to the analyst Gregg Keizer referring to plans of Mozilla, developers of the company integrated the changes made within the last several weeks in Aurora channel - in the beta of Firefox 5, by May 17.

It takes a lot of time Mozilla: in a case with a beta of Firefox 5, three days - for start of the automated tests of quality control and preparation of mechanisms of distribution after merge of the code, noted in the company at the beginning of this month.

As it appears from more frequent diagram of releases planned by the company last month, Firefox 5 sports the few significant changes. Mozilla designated two of them in the blog:

• support of the standard of animation of CSS (cascading style sheets) which still did not get official approval from group of the W3C standards (World Wide Web Consortium);

• existence of the "channel switch" allowing users to switch between three versions of Firefox - "Aurora", a beta and release.

By the way, Chrome from Google and Safari from Apple already support CSS animation.

However Firefox 5 contains much more changes, than Mozilla states. In the detailed publication accompanying the preview, the company counted 1053 corrections. User interface Firefox 5 is identical to his predecessor - Firefox 4 started two months before.

According to the new mode of development Firefox, engineers of Mozilla will add new features immediately after their end, but not to hold to readiness of the following updating. If function causes problems during testing, speak in Aurora channel, they are withdrawn, and then again inserted, in later cycle, after introduction of corrections.

As well as Mozilla will release Google which updates Chrome approximately each eight weeks more releases with smaller quantity of new features and notable changes in each edition.

Mozilla will possibly reject copying of the vigorous diagram of Chrome, but analysts note their similarity and indicate the need to all developers of browsers - to increase the pace to go in step with the growing competition.

Most of them arrived quite so. For example, in the middle of March the debut Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) took place, and behind it the preview of IE10 for developers is almost at once issued, with a hint - releases of this browser rely on the annual schedule - twice faster, than previous. And earlier this month Otello Corporation (former Opera Software) began that "Opera Next" - separate development of the browser which is updated much more often is called.

"The competition always forces people to move quicker", Jan Standal, the vice president for development of desktop software of Opera company told. Opera updates the browser approximately each two months.

If Mozilla sustains the planned terms, Firefox 6 will appear on August 9, in six weeks after Firefox 5. New editions reach users with six-week intervals. It means - Mozilla will complete Firefox 9 by the end of 2011. It is supposed at the same time that his developers will not be interrupted for holidays.