Firefox 4 is another Pain for Developers

Oh man, while everyone is happy with every new browser release, I frown because it means it would be another browser that clients would be demanding from us to test. In my current SharePoint project, the team is spending a lot of time building applications and running them in IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, and Safari. It is really daunting and while IE7 and IE8 are similar, and Firefox 3 and Safari are supposedly similary, there are minor things that pile up really quickly that gets logged on the defect database that we need to address. This has caused a lot of working hours which could have been avoided if there were fewer browsers out there.

Now, Mozilla has announced the upcoming Firefox 4.0 which would be released in 2010. I might be excited as a user but definitely not as the SharePoint Architect of large development teams.

Anyways, Firefox 4 is said to have a lot of improvements on its Javascript performance and Mozilla noted that responsiveness tweaks will be a big part of this upcoming browser. Firefox 4 would first show up in beta come June of 2010 with a final release plan on October or November 2010.

Also, Firefox 4 would have an extensibility platform called “JetPack” including handling of tabs similar to Chrome wherein each tab is run on it’s own process.

Before Firefox 4, Mozilla might release Firefox 3.6 before the end of 2009 which integrated well with Windows 7. Firefox 3.7 would be released in early 2010 which would have improvements on the out of process plugins and book synchronizations.

It is going to be an exciting Firefox 4.0 journey and while a lot of folks are happy with it, some would be suffering because of another browser release.

Image from Mozilla.