I knew I had posted about Firefox in 2010, as it turns out it was at the end of 2009. Okay so for 2010 Mozilla planned to release:

• Firefox 3.6 around Early January 2010. Mozilla was pretty close on this with a January 21, 2010 release.
• Firefox 3.7  “Lorentz” (Gecko 1.9.3) sometime around March 2010 to Mid 2010. Firefox 3.7 never materialized. The ‘alpha’ builds were labeled as Mozilla Developers Preview (1.9.3 alpha). By Mid 2010, the whole project was scrapped and move into the Firefox 4 project.
• Firefox 4 Preview — Late Q2 2010.  I am not even sure what to consider as a “preview”, but that doesn’t much matter as the first Beta of Firefox 4 did come out until July 2010 which would have been Q3.
• Firefox 4 Final – Mid Q4 2010. The idea would have been to get Firefox 4 out before Thanksgiving. Mozilla release Firefox 4 Beta 7 on November 10, 2010.

The reason for this history lesson is because Mozilla just recently announced the Firefox in 2011 Roadmap. A bit ambitious, not only do they plan on releasing Firefox 4, but Firefox 5, 6 and 7 as well within the next 12-18 months. May be ambitious is not the correct word, let’s try idiotic! Firefox 4 is already a quarter behind, has been in development for a year now (as well as stuck in Beta builds for the last 7 months) and Mozilla plans on pushing out 3 more ‘major’ releases this year too? I’d be happy just to see a Road Map for Firefox 4 and may be a draft of Firefox 5.

Okay so here is Mozilla’s grand plan…I mean Roadmap for Firefox in 2011:

Firefox 5

• Account Manager
• Simple Sharing UI
• UI Animation
• 64 Bit on Windows
• …anything that improves responsiveness and is ready
• …anything that improves stability and is ready
• …anything that polishes the user interface and is ready
• …anything else serving product priorities and is ready

Firefox 6

• Web Applications
• FasterCache
• OSX 10.7
• JS Optimizations
• …anything that improves responsiveness and is ready
• …anything that improves stability and is ready
• …anything that polishes the user interface and is ready
• …anything else serving product priorities and is ready

Firefox 7

• e10s? deXBLification?
• …anything that improves responsiveness and is ready
• …anything that improves stability and is ready
• …anything that polishes the user interface and is ready
• …anything else serving product priorities and is ready

This time around Mozilla is not giving any dates, just what features are being planned. You can review the complete Roadmap here.