Firefox 3.0: Mozilla starts brainstorming

Proving that the truly modern company stays nimble on its feet, just as Mozilla had all but finished working on the final version of Firefox 2.0, it announced it is ready to start on its successor: Firefox 3.0.

Release Candidate 3 (RC3) of Firefox 2.0 was posted for download on Mozilla's site on Monday. This is likely to be the final version prior to its official launch.

Also on Monday, Mozilla said it is ready to start work on Firefox 3.0. The announcement was made through a release on the Firefox wiki that invited participants to take part in a "feature brainstorm" of Firefox 3.0.

The statement said: "We are currently in the early development stage for Firefox 3, and would like to collect all the ideas for feature enhancements in a single place. Our goal is to create a single index that lists what sorts of things we're thinking of doing."

More information is available on the wiki, where there are already many ideas for potential improvements to Firefox. These include the creation of desktop shortcuts to work with Microsoft's Internet Explorer, user-controlled style sheets, the option to customise shortcuts and a host of other features. User response began to flow in immediately.

While Firefox 3.0 gets ready in the wings, the launch of RC3 of Firefox 2.0 promises to be important for Mozilla. Until recently it has been gaining share on IE, although it still has only around 10 to 12 per cent of the browser market to IE's 82 per cent.

Recent figures have indicated its growth against IE has begun to slow, leaving users wondering if it can recover momentum with the official launch of version 2.0.

Changes made to Firefox 2.0 include an updated user interface, built-in anti-phishing, inline spell checking, improved tabbed browsing and search capabilities, browser session recovery and an updated add-ons/extensions manager.

Colin Barker writes for ZDNet UK