Firefox 4.0 Beta in June, RTM by the End of 2010

The next major iteration of Firefox will be offered to customers by the end of 2010, Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, promises. Beltzner presented an early product plan for Firefox 4 to the Mozilla community on May 10th, a presentation for which users got a heads-up right here on Softpedia. Mozilla essentially made public its vision for the successor of Firefox 3.6, focusing on the evolution of the open source browser, as well as the timetable for the delivery of major development milestones.

“The primary goals for Firefox 4 will be making a browser: 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,” Beltzner states.

According to the development milestone release schedule, Mozilla will make available for download the first Beta of Firefox 4.0 come next month, in June 2010. In this regard, Firefox 3.7 swallowed codename Lorentz, and will deliver Out of Process Plugins (OOPP) to users as an update to version 3.6. Specifically, Firefox 3.7 was folded into Firefox 3.6.4, which will be finalized and served as a refresh for v 3.6.x by the end of this month.

It is critical to underline that the plans for Firefox 4.0, although already revealed to the public, are not set in stone, and that all aspects of the next version of the browser could change. This being said, June 2010 will bring with it Firefox 4.0 Beta, and current plans are for the release to bring to the table: “most of the new theme for user evaluation; new extension manager for user/add-on developer evaluation; tab management improvements; HTML5 parser, CSS3 transitions, CSP, WebSockets; ‘Reference’ layers implementation,” Beltzner says.

Firefox 4.0 will remain in Beta until October 2010, when Mozilla plans to offer the first Release Candidate for the browser. The final release of Firefox 4.0 will drop by the end of 2010, with the focus on November.

In addition to the three pillars for the development of Firefox 4.0, namely performance, web standards support and a boost to UX, Mozilla intends to introduce 64-bit support, startup time optimizations, more efficient I/O operations, hardware acceleration using the DirectX 11 Direct2D API, multitouch support and Windows 7 Aero Peek integration.

Firefox 4: fast, powerful and empowering