Looks like Christmas caught up to the guys over at Mozilla a bit quicker than they anticipated. Instead of the latest release of Firefox hitting our screens this year, we will now have to wait until the first quarter of 2010 to bask in its benefits.
Mozilla's wiki shows that its goals have changed to "ship Firefox 3.6" early next year, while all of its other development goals in this quarter remain "on track".
That doesn't mean that everything else is still going to plan though. Firefox 4.0 was due to be released in October 2010, but has been pushed back to "late 2010 or early 2011". Firefox 4.0 beta will be available in Summer next year- well that's what Mozilla say now.
When we do eventually get our hands on Firefox 3.6, we can look forward to a 25 per cent reduction in start-up time on Windows as well as the capacity to make use of accelerometers iPhone-style.
It will also feature native video support and two new user enhancements: new browser themes to customise the overall look of the browser, and awesomeformcomplete, which is a smarter (or more awesome) version of auto complete.
The new version Firefox will also provide optimised screen restore, faster JavaScript handling and page load enhancements.
Firefox 3.7 was initially due for release in Spring 2010- when 3.6 will now be out, meaning the new version's big brother won't be seen for quite some time yet.
It's a shame as when 3.7 is finally released, we can look forward to bookmark synchronisation task-orientated browsing, and the ability to run different websites as an application. Nifty, no?
What most people are really hanging out for though is Firefox 4.0, which will be the first version of Firefox to have a user interface native to Windows 7.
It will also come with a new browser synch tool dubbed "Weave", which will connect your PC browser to Firefox's mobile phone browser "Fennec" (yes, also still due to be released).
The beauty of Weave is that it will transfer bookmarks and preferences across different Firefox platforms to give you a supposedly seamless transition each time you move from one device to another.
Does Mozilla's developments tempt you away from IE or Safari? Leave us a comment and let us know.