The non-profit foundation has decided to increase the version number of the next major release to 1.5 from 1.1, reflecting the sheer number of bug fixes and features that have been worked into the next version of the browser. Mozilla still plans to ship the next version of Firefox around September of this year. Read the updated roadmap here.
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Member since:2005-07-06
- a completely cross-platform browser (Gnome/KDE are not)
Uh.. don't both run on the BSDs? And AFAIK, you can run KDE on OSx and even Windows.
- not just a browser, but a completely cross-platform development environment
This is true. They really reinvented the wheel when designing Gecko, XUL and the whole platform it runs on.
Member since:2005-07-18
Uh.. don't both run on the BSDs? And AFAIK, you can run KDE on OSx and even Windows.
They do, and that's how I in fact use KDE, but still they are desktop environments aimed at Unix-type systems. Running KDE on windows requires Cygwin or some other Unix compatibility layer, and even then, I doubt it would be as functional or useable.
The Mozilla platform, on the other hand, with all its warts, is the only system I have seen aside from Java that really attempts to build cross-platform modularity into the core. That's why it can work virtually identically on *nix and Windows systems. Show me the other cross-platform app that accomplishes that, much less another cross-platform development system that does. Even old Netscape was significanly different on Windows that Unix.
I think the closest thing I can think of is Gimp for Windows, which uses Windows GTK. There, you are getting close, but even then, they are different projects, not even released in sync.
Member since:
2005-07-18
Gnome and KDE, which are both much larger projects, are able to release every 6 months. For something that is simply a web browser, they should be able to release more often.
Again, that's a little disingenuous; Gnome and KDE are bigger in "end user" scope, but think about what Firefox is:
- a completely cross-platform browser (Gnome/KDE are not)
- not just a browser, but a completely cross-platform development environment
- an implementation of XUL, an XML-based GUI description language
- possibly the best existing implementation of current CSS and HTML standards
So in one sense it is quite a large project, and involves certain types of complexities that Gnome and KDE do not.