14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox 4 is finally beginning to take shape after quite a few months in development, in one form or another. The first major release since Firefox 3.5, it will be a significant update, but won’t be coming any sooner than November 2010. There are plenty of new things planned or in development for Firefox 4, but Mozilla says it will focus on three key areas aiming to make it “fast, powerful and empowering.”
Firefox 4 will be fast
The first item on the list speaks for itself. Firefox is no slouch, but, with Google Chrome getting faster with each release and others like Opera or Microsoft doubling down on efforts to make their browsers faster, Mozilla needs to step up its game. Firefox can feel a bit sluggish at times, compared with Chrome, for example, and piling on several add-ons only makes it worse.
The UI. Mozilla plans an all-out assault on the performance front in Firefox 4. The user interface will get a major revamp with an emphasis on lightness and simplicity. There will be a lot less elements on the screen at any given time and they should feel snappier too. Mockups of the Firefox 4 UI have been popping up for a while now and the latest versions don’t bring that many changes. Things are not final, though, and the design may and probably will change by the time Firefox 4 lands.
The pages themselves should load and work faster too and it’s not just JavaScript, every aspect of the rendering process should perform better by the time Firefox 4 is ready to ship. The internal workings of the browser are also up for a tune-up. Other small tweaks and design choices are intended to make the browser feel faster as well, things like background updates, fewer dialog boxes, and so on.
HTML5 and JagerMonkey
Firefox 4 will also be “powerful.” What Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, means by that is HTML5 and other new web technologies. Most modern browsers support HTML5, at least partially, but the proposed standard is still evolving and the level of support and feature implementation varies from browser to browser. Firefox 3.6 already has a great implementation of the proposed HTML5 standard, but it’s not complete yet. With Firefox 4, things should move further still.
The new JavaScript engine Mozilla has started working on, JagerMonkey, will also be included. JagerMonkey promises to be a significant upgrade over the existing TraceMonkey. An update in JavaScript performance is somewhat overdue for Firefox, as our testing has shown.
Online identity management tools
The third major focus will be on creating tools for users to better manage their online identity and security, their ‘relationships’ with websites. Mozilla Labs is working on several projects to that end. Account Manager, which enables users to quickly log in or out of web services and sites through the browser interface rather than links on the site, has just graduated from Labs.
Firefox Contacts is another add-on that aims to merge all of the different contacts lists from across the web or from your desktop into a unified and easily accessible one, built into the browser. These features and others providing better control over privacy and identity may end up in Firefox 4.
The Jetpack extensions platform
Another significant update could be integrated support for the Jetpack extensions platform. Jetpack is still in development, having received a 'reboot' recently, but promises to make add-on management and development for Firefox significantly easier. The project has been in the works for many months and is looking promising, but there’s no way of knowing if it will be finalized or mature enough for inclusion in Firefox 4.
3D graphics and 64-bit support
Among the other features planned for Firefox 4 are animation of web content (CSS) and better support for audio- and video-file playback, the <audio> and <video> tags in HTML5. There’s an ongoing debate about the video codec choice for HTML5 and Mozilla is very much in the middle of it. 2D drawing, at least on Windows, will be faster in the upcoming release and support for 3D graphics, through WebGL, should be more mature.
On the more technical side, Firefox 4 will get native 64-bit support on both Windows and Mac OS X. The browser will also be optimized for modern machines taking advantage of their capabilities, for example by using hardware graphics acceleration, to make the browsing experience faster and better.
Can’t wait to get your hands on Firefox 4? Check out the planned release schedule here or grab the Firefox 3.7 preview release that incorporates some of the features planned for Firefox 4, like the UI.
Firefox 3.7 Alpha 3 for Windows is available for download here. Firefox 3.7 Alpha 3 for Mac OS X is available for download here. Firefox 3.7 Alpha 3 for Linux is available for download here.
