Mozilla Firefox 3.1 alpha July, beta version August, final release 08 or early 09

We all know about the brand new Mozilla Firefox 3.0 and of course have downloaded it myself and must say it is great, well just weeks after the Firefox 3.0 the open-source developer has just put across new ship dates for the all new version, obviously if approved, they are hoping to produce an alpha release next month and the final no later than early 2009.

Mozilla are hoping to have the first Firefox 3.1 developer preview, or alpha, ready by July and then want to move to beta by august, A month ago, when Mozilla first started discussing Firefox 3.1 internally, the company’s vice president of engineering, Mike Schroepfer, said the upgrade’s target ship date was the end of 2008. Hopefully if Mozilla keeps with that plan Firefox 3.1 would be its first fast-track update of course with a development timeline much shorter than usual. The all new Firefox 3.1 will have so many new features that did not make it into the recent Firefox 3.0.

Some of the new improvements they hope to include into Firefox 3.1 are that of changes to the revamped book-marking that debuted in 3.0 plus some modifications to a brand new amped-up location bar. Some of the changes do in fact rely on improvements to the Gecko engine that underpins Firefox plus of course other applications, applications like Mozilla Messaging Thunderbird e-mail client, the devs are working on Gecko 1.9.1 at the same time as Mozilla Firefox 3.1.

Oh just a recap on Firefox 3.0 downloads, since the 17th of June launch more than 21.8 million copies of Firefox 3.0 were downloaded.

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