Mozilla Outlines Its Goals For 2012

Mozilla recently announced the availability of Firefox 11, which brings along a bunch of new features and a ton of bug fixes. In a blog post on Wednesday, the company has outlined the things it accomplished with Firefox in 2011, and what it has already done and plan to do in 2012.
Though Firefox is moving to a more rapid release schedule, Mozilla will soon lay far less emphasis on those rapidly increasing version numbers--similar to what Google has already done with Chrome.

"With rapid releases and new version numbers, we have had questions about what they mean and communicate. 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 (e.g. version 6 to 7, 7 to 8, etc) 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," Mozilla said.
It added, "From a branding perspective, it will likely more go into being just Firefox, and that versioning will be more transparent."
Firefox in 2012
Add-on compatibility: All add-ons that were marked compatible for Firefox 4 and higher will automatically be enabled in Firefox 10 and later.
Add-on sync: Firefox Sync are being used by a lot of people, and in 2011 there were 25 billion items synced. To complement that, from Firefox 11 you can now also sync add-ons.
Silent updates: To cater to update fatigue, updates will now be downloaded and installed silently in the background. It means that startup and shutdown of the Web browser won’t be affected by installation routines. Additionally, the What’s New page displayed after an update can now be displayed depending if there is important information needed to be displayed to the end user. Silent updates are currently planned to land in Firefox 13.
Developer Tools: Our Developer Tools in Firefox continue to evolve, with a number of features outlined in the Developer Tools roadmap.