Extend Firefox, Tabs, Roadmap

November 5th, 2005

The Mozilla Corp. has launched a competition to build extensions for Firefox 1.5. The contest started on the 3rd November and you have until January 6th. You also need to live in the US of A, Canada or the United States of Europe. Top prize is an insanely cool Alienware PC. Jesse Ruderman has a list of extension ideas if you plan on entering.

Firefox Engineer/Google Employee Ben Goodger writes on a usability review of tabbed browsing in Firefox by Google. One thing they’ve been experimenting with is putting the close button on each tab, similar to other tabbed browsers. This seems to slow down users as they need to make sure they are selecting rather than closing the tab, but makes it more tabbish

There is an update to the Mozilla Roadmaps. According to the Product Roadmap, Firefox 2.0 will be built off the Mozilla 1.8 branch and Firefox 3.0 from the Mozilla 1.9 Trunk. In other words, development on Firefox 2.0 and Firefox 3.0 will happen simultaneously. They are aiming for a release every 9 to 12 months and security/stability updates every 6 to 8 weeks. Firefox 2.0 is due around August 2006. See the Mozilla Wiki for some information on what Firefox 2.0 may contain. The Gecko 1.9 roadmap contains some features Firefox 3.0 will probably get.