Although Mozilla is still readying Firefox 4 for its official release, the organization is already laying out its plans for subsequent versions of the open source Web browser. In a roadmap published earlier this year, Mozilla revealed plans to issue three more major releases during 2011–bringing the browser’s version number up to seven.
As we discussed in our coverage of the roadmap, Mozilla’s plan is ambitious and will require a dramatic overhaul of the Firefox development process. Mozilla—which has historically had lengthy development cycles and protracted beta testing—will have to transition to a faster and less-conservative approach to release management. The organization has authored a document that describes how such a transition could potentially be achieved.
