Mozilla has made major changes to how it develops Firefox, and plans to drop Firefox 3.7 from its schedule and instead roll out incremental changes throughout the year, a company executive said today.

Rather than add features to Firefox only in once- or twice-a-year upgrades, Mozilla will quietly insert some functionality via its regular security updates, which appear every four to six weeks, said Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox, in an interview Thursday.

That means Firefox 3.7, which was slated for a second quarter release, has been dropped from the development schedule, said Beltzner. The next version of the open-source browser after the almost-ready Firefox 3.6 will be an as-yet-unnamed update at the end of this year or in early 2011.

Full story: Computerworld