Mozilla notified developers late last week that it intends to adopt a shorter development cycle for Firefox browser releases. Though this will help Firefox avoid losing more market share to Google's Chrome -- and put more pressure on Microsoft to follow suit with Internet Explorer -- the real winner is the browser user, noted Net Applications Executive Vice President Vince Vizzaccaro.

"We're seeing a commitment from all of the major browser providers to devote additional resources to their browsers, and to enhance and update them much more quickly than any time before in the history of the Internet," Vizzaccaro said. "They understand that browser users have options fostered by competition."
There are a lot of benefits to smoothing and streamlining development processes to release functionality on a more incremental basis, noted Al Hilwa, director of applications software development at IDC. "This is something Microsoft and other software developers have to grapple with," Hilwa said.

Microsoft's IE9 Strategy

According to Net Applications, Internet Explorer's share of the global browser market held steady in March at 55.92. Firefox (21.80 percent) was second, followed by Chrome (11.57 percent), Apple's Safari (6.61 percent), and Opera (2.15 percent).
Since IE9 only had a 3.6 percent usage share in March, Microsoft's new browser has had minimal impact on the browser market so far. One reason is that IE9 is not compatible with Windows XP, which "currently has 54 percent of global usage share," the web-metrics firm noted.
Over the long run, however, IE9 could potentially make big gains since it has been designed to take advantage of the rich graphics capabilities of Windows 7 and its underlying 64-bit hardware, Net Applications said.
"Windows 7 usage share is following a strong, fairly linear path upward," it observed. "And Windows versions from Vista forward should have a majority share within a couple of years."
Countering Rivals
Mozilla hopes to thwart Microsoft's long-term strategy for IE9 by speeding up its browser release schedule. For example, it will stagger Firefox's four stages of development -- called the Mozilla-central, Mozilla-aurora, Firefox-beta and Mozilla-release channels -- so that a general Firefox release can ship at week 16 and potentially as soon as every six weeks thereafter.
However, Firefox 5's ship date will be slightly different from future releases due to the lack of a development overlap with Firefox 4. "Rather than six weeks for Mozilla-central, Mozilla-aurora, and Mozilla-beta, we instead have three weeks for development on Mozilla-central, five weeks to converge and stabilize on Mozilla-aurora, and five weeks to validate on Mozilla-beta," the browser maker noted.
The normal development schedule -- under which every step in the cycle takes six weeks -- will begin with Firefox 6's development cycle, which "starts when Firefox 5 is cloned from Mozilla-central to Mozilla-aurora on April 12, Mozilla said. In other words, Firefox 6 potentially could ship before the end of summer.
Firefox's market share has been slowly declining in recent months due to the rising popularity of the Chrome browser, which Google updates frequently and even on an automatic basis.
"Chrome's development model has been a successful experiment in terms of getting production releases with improvements and new features out quickly and much faster than in the past," Hilwa said. "I think this is causing waves in the industry, most specifically for direct competitors."

While Firefox 4 sports a "check for updates" menu item and an update screen, an automatic browser update was postponed to Firefox 5. Additionally, support for 64-bit PC platforms is reportedly high on Mozilla's list for Firefox 5.
"Firefox has certainly upped its game and is trying hard to fight the battle with Chrome for the power user where Chrome has gained share," Hilwa said.

From Yahoo News