Firefox's official roadmap has been updated, and boy are there some interesting changes afoot. Most notably, Firefox 7 will ship in 2011. The second biggy, and the main focus of Firefox development in 2011, is to make sure there is no more than 50ms between any user interaction and feedback from the browser.

As far as feature sets go, this is what the roadmap looks like: Firefox 5 will absorb the Account Manager and F1 Simple Sharing add-ons to become built-in features. It looks like Windows 7 64-bit will be officially supported with FF5, too.

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It's amazing how much can transpire in 10 months, make that 4-7 & 8 and 9... throw in 10.0 Beta 1 :)

Apart from Firefox 9.0.1 on general release and Beta on 10.0, there's also Aurora on 11.0

Download Firefox Aurora in your language to experience the newest features and innovations in an unstable environment even before they go to Beta

Aurora comes in 87 different languages!

And, if that's not living near enough to the crashing, er, I mean leading edge, there's always the Nightly compiles, now up to version 12.0 complete with a Windows 64-bit version.

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I run Nightly most of the time, rarely crashes. Every once in a while, though, there's a build that's really bad - always keep the stable version installed to fall back on.

I wonder if Mozilla will update 9 a few more times before they jump to 10. If I remember correctly 5 - 8 got 1, maybe 2 updates, then they moved on to the next major release! We're already @ 9.0.1...? I hope the addon//extension devs can keep up.

With only 6 weeks between major updates, not likely to be many security/stability patches in between; 1 or 2 is probably going to be the new norm.

As for add-on compatibility, they're changing to a system where add-ons will be enabled by default: Solving Firefox’s add-on compatibility problem « Blair’s Brain. Add-on authors won't necessarily have to update for every new Firefox version jump, only if a problem is reported will that be needed. This is already enabled in Nightly 12.0a1 builds.

An extension, Add-on Compatibility Reporter, has been created that makes it easy for testers to report any incompatible add-ons. This ought to result in problems being caught before final release. Sure hope it works.

I think that they should stop bumping the major version number every minor release and do something useful instead, such as adding syntax highlighting support for JavaScript, JSON and CSS.

I run Nightly most of the time, rarely crashes. Every once in a while, though, there's a build that's really bad - always keep the stable version installed to fall back on.

Actually, according to the online crash analyses (and despite my tongue-in-cheek comments) the Beta and Aurora channels are hardly any less reliable than the Release channel, with occasional exceptions because Aurora hiccups every so often.

So, how do you install TWO instances of Firefox on the same computer? More particularly, how do you install the Nightlies so that they do not use either the same Program folder nor even the same Application profile as the regular edition?

I'm sure there's a Mozilla support article on how to do this. Trouble is, I just can't find it1

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Not hard at all - Nightly and Aurora are not named Firefox so they automatically install into their own named folder, creating one if it doesn't exist. With Betas you have to choose a "custom" install and direct it to install in a folder you manually create, or you can use the Portable versions. Uncheck the "start...now" box unless you want to use your existing profile (which is risky).

I'm too tired to go on, the rest of the info is here: Installing and running multiple versions of Firefox. • mozillaZine Forums

I think they should make improved HTML5 and CSS3 support, and make 64-bit Windows builds.

I think they should make improved HTML5 and CSS3 support, and make official 64-bit Windows builds.

FTFY

They have nightly builds that have been x64 since 4.0, and if I remember right 5.0 was supposed to be official release x64 builds. Then the new number format came and it was said to be 8 or 9. Sadly, x64 still is not here and the nightlies are on 12.0...

They're now saying the 12.0 release will include x64, for whatever that's worth. In the mean time, the Nightlies are pretty good.

Yeah the nightlies are good, I just wish they'd keep to what they say and release the x64 build officially when they actually say they will.