On the heels of the release of Firefox 1.0.1, officials at Mozilla Foundation on Thursday laid out the near-term roadmap for updates to that browser, as well as the Mozilla suite and the Thunderbird e-mail client.

Next on the release track, said Aza Dotzler in a posting to the Mozilla site, will be Thunderbird, the stand-alone e-mail client that the foundation's pitching as a Microsoft Outlook replacement. Like Firefox's update Thursday, Thunderbird 1.0.1 will be a minor upgrade, and should hit the Internet the middle of next week, Dotzler said.

Mozilla 1.7.6, may also ship next week, Dotzler added, and will include many of the same security fixes as in Firefox 1.0.1 and Thunderbird 1.0.1. "I'm usually overly-optimistic but I think we can get that out next week too," wrote Dotzler in his posting.

The first beta of Mozilla 1.8 will appear after that, with beta 2 expected in about three weeks.

Mozilla 1.8, Firefox 1.1, and Thunderbird 1.1 are all on schedule to ship by the middle of the year.