Firefox 7 – this is the Firefox you won’t be waiting for

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I don’t like waiting for apps to start on my desktop. I want a smartphone type experience where i am instantly gratified. Mozilla understands users like me and they’re going to deliver what we want.

Firefox 7 (no that’s not a typo) has a set of cold start improvements that will make Firefox startup on LInux lighting fast (and oh yeah Windows users will be faster too).

“The 20-line patch to Firefox 4 that makes startup on Windows up to 2x as fast and the stupid one-liner that does the same on Linux both grew into a full fledged preloading solution working on all our supported platforms,” Mozilla developer Mike Hommey  blogged. “This involved major changes to how we initialize Firefox, and a few glitches with our leak detector, but this time it should stay for good (it had been backed out twice already).”

Considering the new rapid release cycle that Mozilla has, we will see these startup improvements, sooner rather than later too. Firefox 5 is out today, I expect to see Firefox 6 inside of the next 3 months and Firefox 7 three months after that…so maybe inside of 2011?