Lead engineer for the project Ben Goodger noted that the new roadmap for Firefox 2 will include an alpha release developer preview in March and a beta release preview in April.

Firefox 1.1 is scheduled for a June 2005 release. It originally had been slated for March, but Goodger said that more time was needed for testing, according to news reports.

Ambitious Plans

On the Mozilla site, Goodger has noted that Firefox will be a critical delivery vehicle for Gecko and XULRunner technology.

"Our goal is to continue to build a 'best of breed' browser product for Windows , Linux and Mac OS X," he writes.

Mozilla and the Firefox developers have ambitious goals for the work to be done between now and the next major release, Goodger added.

No specific details have been given about what Firefox 2 might include. But Goodger posits that some likely goals include improvements to bookmarks, accessibility compliance, and improvements to the extensions system , toolbar and software-update functionalities.

Two for Two Possible

Firefox's success has seemed to take even Mozilla advocates by surprise. On the SpreadFirefox site's blog, it was noted that on January 29th, Firefox downloads topped the 21 million mark.

"We've added another million downloads in the last four days," writes site administrator Asa. "That's amazing."

As version 1.1 and then version 2 get released, it is very likely that the browser's popularity will continue, said AMR Research analyst Paul Kirby.

"It has a lot of momentum," he told NewsFactor. "That will carry it into the enterprise space, and cause more and more downloads."

Corporate Sector

As Firefox continues to evolve, Mozilla will need to find a way to make it more of a corporate tool, rather than a consumer darling. To do that, Firefox will have to woo developers into tweaking Web-driven applications, Kirby said.

"We're seeing companies interested in the browser, but they're reluctant to change because their Web-based applications are compatible with Internet Explorer," he said. "For more Firefox adoption, software vendors will have to stop relying on IE functionality and accept the Firefox standard."

Firefox also will need centralized management to conquer the corporate space, said Craig Roth, Meta Group analyst.

"If you have 10,000 desktops, you're going to want a centralized way to deploy patches," he told NewsFactor. "No one will run around with a disk just because they like Firefox."