• ZDNet, Thursday, March 15, 2012 12:06 PM

Still fighting for a share of the browser market, Mozilla Firefox is laying out its plan of attack for 2012. For starters, Firefox plans to make version numbering less of an issue. In other words, it plans to move away from ‘Firefox X.x,’ and instead just think of the browser as ‘Firefox,’ ZDNet reports.

As Robert Nyman, technical evangelist for Mozilla explains: “Version numbers will play a lesser and lesser role for users, but they will still matter to Web developers, IT administrators and similar. The reason for having major version number bumps … is that new versions have had cases of non-backward compatible APIs, and the version number have been there to signal that it is not a minor release or maintenance update.” To cater to “update fatigue,” as ZDNet puts it, updates will now be downloaded and installed silently in the background.

Also in 2012, Mozilla is planning to do a better job with add-on compatibility. One of the biggest problems with updating Firefox has been add-ons, which can break or stop working until they are updated by the developer -- and then updated in Firefox by the end user, according to ZDNet.

Read the whole story at ZDNet »