Firefox's future features: 3.6, 3.7, and 4.0

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Some new fruits of Mozilla's effort to speed Firefox development are about to arrive.

Mozilla plans to release the first beta version of 3.6 this weekend or early next week. But what exactly is coming in the new version and its successors?

Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of product development, and John Lilly, Mozilla's chief executive, detailed some of the browser's future in an interview at the corporation's headquarters here. And the company has an aggressive schedule, with three releases due within about a year.

The present version of Firefox was to have been called 3.1, but with significant new features, it became Firefox 3.5--and arrived later than 3.1 had been planned. Version 3.6 is slated for release in final form this year, with 3.7 in the first half of next year and 4.0 about a year from now, Lilly said.

"We're trying to shrink these development cycles down," Shaver said.

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