Mozilla sets Firefox 4 release for November
submitted by markodonoghue on 13 May 2010
Mozilla is planning to ship a Beta version of Firefox 4 next month and the final version by the end of November.
Mike Beltzner, who is the director of Firefox, gave a presentation and showed not only the timeline for the next major upgrade but also outlined the new features, changes and technology enhancements in which the company hopes to feature into the browser.
Performance is one of the key areas Firefox 4 will address, said Beltzner. "Performance is a huge, huge, huge thing for us," he said. "We created the performance story, and we've got to keep at it."
Beltzner emphasized that Mozilla will both boost the raw speed of Firefox - it has been working on ways to push its TraceMonkey JavaScript engine - and in users' perception of speed.
The latter will be tackled by slimming down Firefox's user interface, something Mozilla has been working on since last year. "The simpler an interface looks, the faster it will seem," said Beltzner. "The less the user has to take in with their eye, the quicker they can process it and the quicker the entire application will seem. So we're actually looking at making our interface faster just by changing the way it looks."
The new interface for Firefox 4 will remind us all of Google's Chrome, with tabs above the toolbar and address bar, fewer buttons - including an all-in-one Home button that is also a single-menu App button - and fewer dialog box interruptions. Mozilla is also aiming to eventually emulate Chrome by applying updates silently in the background.
Speed improvements could be crucial to Firefox's future. Although the browser was once one of the fastest when measured by the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark scores, more recently it has lagged behind rivals such as Chrome, Apple's Safari and Opera Software's Opera. In Computerworld 's latest tests, Firefox beat only one browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), in JavaScript rendering speeds.
If it follows through on its Direct2D hardware acceleration plans, Mozilla will join Microsoft, which has pinned high hopes on the technology for its upcoming IE9, in tapping the power of a Windows PC's graphics processor, or GPU. Direct2D is available, however, only in Windows Vista and Windows 7; Windows XP users will not be able to take advantage of the feature.
Mozilla is also planning to integrate a single sign-on feature with Firefox 4 to make it easier for users to log in to Web sites, and hopes to add a permissions manager to let users control passwords, cookies and geo location settings on specific sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Gmail.
But the browser has a head start of sorts, since Mozilla has been issuing alpha-quality builds of the upgrade since February. The fourth "Developer Preview" was released April 12 , but yesterday Beltzner said a fifth and final alpha would likely show up this month.
Historically, Mozilla has had a difficult time keeping to its initial development schedules. Firefox 3.6, for example, which launched last January, was released about two months later than first planned.
Beltzner hinted that the same could happen with Firefox 4. If it looks like the upgrade won't make it out the door by the end of November, Mozilla will skip a December release and push the browser into early 2011. "December is a bad time to release a product" Beltzner said.
Submitted by:
Mark O'Donoghue
Associated Links:
http://www.itnews.com/browsers/17681/mozilla-sets-firefox-4-release-november?page=0,1
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