Mozilla is preparing o ship the final version of its new Firefox 4 browser as soon as next week. Competitive pressures from Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 and Google's steady stream of Chrome updates appear to be driving the push to finish Firefox 4 and avoid losing more browser market share.
Mozilla only launched its Firefox 4 release candidate for Windows, Mac and Linux last week, giving testers little time to evaluate the product, which is available in more than 70 languages. However, Damon Sicore, director of platform engineering, said Firefox 4 RC1 received a very warm welcome and the time had come for Mozilla to make a decision to ship.
Though Mozilla hadn't made a final decision on the March 22 ship date, "as of now, there are no known issues that would stop us from shipping RC1 as final," Sicore wrote in a developer community forum. "If at any time we discover issues that would block final release, we would issue an RC2 as soon as possible, reset the ship date, and communicate to everyone."
According to Net Applications, Internet Explorer led the global browser market in February with a 56.77 percent share, followed by Firefox (21.74 percent), Google Chrome (10.93 percent), and Apple's Safari (6.36 percent). Though Firefox lost about one percentage point from the previous month, this was due to a change in weighting by the web-metrics provider based on CIA data on Internet users per country.
Firefox 4's new JagerMonkey JavaScript engine delivers faster start-up times and graphics rendering, while the browser's support for the WebM format will enable HD-quality videos to run online. The new browser release also features WebGL -- an open standard for accelerated 3D graphic rendering that eliminates the need for users to install special plug-ins.
WebGL will make it easier for web developers to create interactive 3D games, vivid graphics, and new visual experiences for Firefox without requiring a special plug-in. WebGL is based on OpenGL ES 2.0, the same 3D API used for Android and iOS development, noted Principal Firefox Engineer Vlad Vukicevic.
Many resources available for ES 2.0 development translate almost directly to WebGL development," Vukicevic wrote in a blog. "Unlike desktop or mobile OpenGL development, it's very easy to get started with WebGL -- some simple HTML and JS content lets you immediately start writing WebGL code."
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