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web applications and speed are priorities for the forthcoming Firefox (Namoroka)

By Percy Cabello

the tradition of using names of national parks code names for the release of Firefox, Mozilla has chosen Namoroka , a park in Madagascar, to name the development cycle that began recently, when Mozilla decided to separate the current Firefox 3.5 (Shiretoko), and began to development of its next version in the trunk (Minefield).

Firefox is assigned the next numbered 3.6 (and binaries are already labeled that way), but not very safe to remain as final, especially when you consider the amount of improvements and features that are listed in draft plans for the future of Namoroka [en] , posted by Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox product.

As in previous works, plans to cycle start prioritizing the goals and characteristics.

First: Performance

• : obtain an improvement in your browser and start creating new tabs (reduced by at least 50 ms), and improve overall response time due to the addition of animated transitions for actions such as creating tab, move, add bookmarks, etc.. Chrome (and Mac OS X before) has shown that transitions can make a difference in the feel of how fast it feels a browser, and something that was considered in time for Firefox 3.5. Notably Mozilla is planning to implement this feature to XUL, at platform level, so will benefit not only Firefox, but all XUL-based applications (Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Flock, Songbird, etc).
• A very requested feature: the activations themes and extensions without restarting is something that is being considered for this version, at least partially. The draft mentions it briefly as "light items" and "light extensions, which would mean they would not have any add chrome or platform components (XPCOM).
• Best UI for uploading . It would be a feature welcome as the old method of clicking and browsing and does not go. Dragdropupload is a Firefox extension that lets you do this by dragging and dropping files, and automatically adds more fields attachments in Gmail
• Merge common preferences for specific sites within the site button.
• An option to make web applications, desktop applications , which means incorporating Prism Mozilla Labs on Firefox, an idea long available as an extension for Firefox. Far superior to the web application deployment desktop Chrome. You can get it in Mozilla Add-ons .
  
  

  

• Using Aero Glass, for users of Windows Vista and 7 have finally translucent toolbars. Support for Aero Peek (in the case of Firefox, the ability to view tabs as thumbnails on the taskbar Windows 7) is mentioned, but not prioritized yet. Despite this, after having used the beta of Windows 7 by a couple of weeks, do not think it is very necessary.

Then other priorities, minor, we may note:

• Session Management, or the ability to save a set of tabs and their state, so you can open the same way at another time.
• Add some file management permits the download manager (move, copy and delete)
• Taskfox , a bill introduced a couple of weeks ago that seeks to offer some of the Ubiquity command to perform some common tasks in Firefox code.
• A site for a new tab better and more helpful.
• A page about: I , which will serve to offer some basic statistics about your browsing habits, based on your history. This was also considered to Firefox 3.5.
• Identity management is again being meant for inclusion. No details yet about how it will be implemented, but CardSpace and OpenID are on the list of features of Firefox 3 for some time.
• In Mac OS X, include the native spelling. In the same vein, support for Keychain (global administrator password), and AppleScript (macro language), will also be added, but still do not know how. Road users have been enjoying these features long time, so it would be very difficult to move a few lines of code. Mozilla is

estimating a development cycle of 10 months, so we would expect that Namoroka reaches its final version by May 2010.