Firefox 2.0 To Stress Tab, Bookmark, Extension Changes

Mozilla Corp.'s lead engineer isn't worried about Microsoft's upcoming Internet Explorer 7, but instead is focusing on getting the next version of Firefox out the door.

"IE 7 is a pretty good catch-up," said Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering. "But it does some funny things with tabs and the UI that I don't understand why they did it."

Mozilla, which plans to ship the next major update, Firefox 2.0, by early in the third quarter, is concentrating on adding features and improvements to make sure that its browser stays ahead of Microsoft. "Firefox 1.5 was focused on the platform, but 2.0 will be about the UI, a smaller set of platform things, and more features that the user will see," Schroepfer said.

Development of Firefox 2.0 has been stalled as of late. "Open-source development leverages so many different people that it's ultimately less predictable because of that, and because you're dealing with volunteers," admitted Schroepfer. "Essentially, we trade predictability for quality and the total amount of work we can do on a project," he said, compared

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