Mozilla Organization Revises Development Roadmap and Product Release Schedule

By Mike Angelo -- 22 December 2000 (c)

The Mozilla Organization publicly published its newly revised Mozilla Development Roadmap and Mozilla browser-suite release schedule December 21, 2000. The Mozilla browser-suite is the basic prototype Mozilla-based application upon which other browsers, such as Netscape 6 and the upcoming new NeoPlanet browser, are built.

The revision adds two new milestone releases. One Milestone, 0.7, is scheduled for release by Year's end. The other, 0.8, is expected to be released mid-February 2001. Please see Table 1, below.

"The milestones are intended to be periodic check points for progress on the project, stability of builds, porting status, and are entry points for additional mozilla (sic) contributors to provide testing and engineering help on the project." (Project Sea Monkey)

The Mozilla Mtrunk daily builds are reasonably stable and features-complete. We find many of them quite usable -- insofar as the browser module is concerned. Moreover, they are much better than the Netscape 6.0 browser.

Therefore, we expect that Milestone 0.7 browser quite likely will be suitable for daily use. (We have been using the 17 November Linux and Windows Mtrunk, pre-Milestone 0.7, builds as our primary browser.)

The original Mozilla Roadmap schema used the term Milestone plus a number, such as Milestone 18, to label its interim developer releases. Then in September 2000, after the Milestone 18 release, the Mozilla folks revised the Roadmap and changed the numbering schema to its present form, such as Mozilla 0.9.

The September developer release plan revision jumped from M18 (released in October 2000) to Mozilla 0.6 (released in December 2000). Then, the September 2000 Roadmap revision skipped from Mozilla 0.6 to Mozilla 0.9 for release in the 2001 first quarter. That September 2000 Roadmap plan jumped over Milestones 0.7 and 0.8 Please see Table 2.