Firefox 1.1 running late

Mozilla's next version of its browser, Firefox 1.1, will be released three months later than originally planned, according to Ben Goodger, the lead programmer on Firefox.

"In a move that I would hope should surprise exactly nobody, we're pushing back 1.1 by a little bit because of the realities of the work remaining to be done," said Goodger, in a blog posting last week.

Some reports have speculated that the change in date was caused by Goodger's recent move to Google. But Goodger denied these reports in a later post.

"Also, the slippage from March is not due to my move to Google, it is due to us needing to ensure the 1.1 release is of identical quality and scope as the 1.0 release - that means a period of testing, the localisation system needs to be brought back online, etc," said Goodger. "These things are done by more people than just myself, so quit with the wacky speculation."

Firefox 1.1 was initially scheduled to be released around March 2005. But the final version has been delayed until June 2005, as shown on the updated Firefox roadmap on the Mozilla website.

David Hallowell, a Mozilla contributor, said that one of the primary goals for Firefox 1.1 is to improve the browsing experience for non-Windows users.

"One of the main aims of 1.1 is to improve the user experience for users on Linux and Mac machines so that they can have a version of Firefox that fits in with their operating system as well as the Windows version fits in with the Windows OS," said Hallowell.

Firefox 1.1 is aiming to tackle the enterprise market, by making the browser available in Windows Installer (MSI) format to make corporate deployment easier. Firefox has not experienced many enterprise-wide deployments, according to some analysts.

Browsing will be faster in version 1.1 due to improvements in the rendering engine, according to Hallowell.

"A lot has gone on behind the scenes improving Gecko, which is the rendering engine used by Firefox, Mozilla and other browsers such as Camino," said Hallowell. "1.1 will see the result of these improvements including faster page rendering, further improved standards support and further incremental improvements."

The current version of Firefox 1.0 has been downloaded over 20 million times, since its release in November 2004. It is approaching a five per cent market share and may see its market share rise to 20 per cent by the end of 2005, according to research.