Firefox Developers Outline Firefox 4 Product Plan
Mozilla's Director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner, has updated his personal blog with information about the upcoming Firefox 3.7 and Firefox 4 release.
The product plan for Firefox outlines the primary goals for Firefox 4 and aims to clear some of the confusion that surrounds the current versioning used by Mozilla for the web browser.
The blog post is actually a summary of a presentation that is available as a slideshow and video on the blog as well.
The most important announcement concerns how Mozilla plans to go forward in regards to Firefox.
Beltzner states that Mozilla developers managed to implement the out of process plugin feature that was initially planned for Firefox 3.7 in the soon to be released Firefox 3.6.4.
This effectively allowed Mozilla to turn Firefox 3.7 into Firefox 3.6.4 as it was the one defining feature planned for version 3.7 of the browser.
This means that there will be no Firefox 3.7 release as the feature is already rolled out in the 3.6 branch of the browser..
Mozilla plans to make the jump directly to Firefox 4 instead from Firefox 3.6 with a first beta release expected in June 2010 and the release candidate 1 in October 2010.
The primary goals for Firefox 4 are the following ones:
Fast: making Firefox super-duper fast
Powerful: enabling new open, standard Web technologies (HTML5 and beyond!),
Empowering: putting users in full control of their browser, data, and Web experience.
Planned features of Firefox 4:
- Performance optimizations
- New optimized theme
- Updates and installations without restarting the browser
- Control over website permissions and relationship status
- Jetpack based add-ons running out of process
- New web development tools, HTML5 and web technology support, native multimedia capabilities
- 64-bit support
- startup optimization, reduced I/O operations, DOM performance improvements, new JavaScript engine, hardware acceleration, multitouch support
You can visit Mike's post to take a look at the slideshow presentation or watch the video of the presentation in a HTML5 video capable browser.
Advertisement
I`ll like to see Chrome 6 vs Firefox 4 vs IE9. I think IE9 crush them this time but don`t want to see that. Chrome is progressing leaps and bounds, I think that they may add some unique features. Maybe Webkit2>Chakra>Gecko 1.9.3.
Firefox developers seem to be spooked by the Google Chrome Beta series which is emerging as the fastest browser around, and now it has a healthy “extension” ecosystem.