Mozilla has further detailed its new development model for Firefox. The current draft says Firefox 5 will arrive on June 21, 2011 and Firefox 6 will be released on August 18, 2011. These dates may change, but they're what the company is currently aiming for.

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Omfg they're multiplying.

BTW, I didn't like 4. I'm sticking with 3.6 for a looong time.

Haha, Mozilla is trollin'...

I love Firefox, don't get me wrong, but I find it hard to believe they'll commit to this. They are a perfectionist team, that puts a lot of effort into their releases. I find hard to believe they are willing to give that up for faster releases.

I could be wrong...

At this rate, Firefox will achieve consciousness on May 4, 2017.

Not before Google creates Skynet. =p

They want to do what Google does with Chrome.

As a lot of people have said that the Chrome dev channel is even more stable than Firefox 4.0 (the stable one) that wouldn't be an entirely non-justifiable decision.

It's better to not have a single major release containing new features when you can add those new features - and fix them up - whenever you wish. Theoretically, this also prevents burning out.

i'm still thinking they're doing all these releases in quick succession for the free cake Microsoft's IE team sends

Opera has been doing this recently, too.
I don't like it - the practice trivialises version numbers, which should really be reserved for major enhancements and/or rewrites. From what I can imagine, these are simply incremental builds. (eg Fx 4.1) There's nothing wrong with that - just call a spade a spade and be done with it. Generating hype for minimal improvement is just annoying.

Don't they know that version numbers stop being sexy around 15 or so? How does Firefox 27 sound to everyone?

+1 Rick about version numbers.

I believe 'only inclusion of reasonable number of major features' should compel a software maker to give its product a full release number; but Google has simply muddied the water with their unusual version number scheming.

@Guest
At certain point in time version numbers will become meaningless, e.g. just look at nvidia's drivers, last time I checked they were something like 270.xx (quoting just for the sake of understanding); I wonder if they can 'name' each individual release, e.g. 'Firefox Green' (because green is very much in with economentalists ).

Basically Cloud is Skynet

There's something very paedophillic about that statement. Anyway, I think this is just Mozillas glory grabbing way of being able to release Firefox 8 for Windows 8.

@Lurker101 Fair point - very poor choice of words. (Apologies. @Mod, feel free to change wording to 'catchy'!)

I just meant that they are rushing 'progress' for short term marketing gain. I was thinking Opera 11, Windows 7, Mac OSX, firefox 4...

I'm going to shut up now.

That's ridiculous. They're all loosey goosey with those version numbers because the token fat guy won't work without a cake each month?

Indeed! But how did you come to this conclusion, by polling convicted pedophiles?

LMAO, that was freakin funny. I'm still laughing.

I'd rather they stick with the first number change for major versions (which could be once a year), and just keep the 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, etc. numbering convention which makes it easier to follow the program development process and installed versions.

Google won't let them.