Mozilla presented an early product plan for Firefox 4, the
next major release of Firefox to the Mozilla community.
The company aims at making Firefox 4 faster, more powerful
by enabling new open, standard Web technologies (HTML5 and
beyond) and also put users in full control of their browser
and data.
Firefox 4 is expected to offer a new simpler default theme
featuring fewer user interface controls, performance
optimizations with updates to apply in the background, no
interruptions at startup or modal dialogs as well as faster
navigation for web users.
Website's permissions will be available with a simpler
control and users will be able to back up and share data
with Firefix Sync.
Add-ons will be also easier to discover and installation
will not require restart.
Mozilla also wants to make FireFox 4 more attractive to
developers. FireFox 4 will support new web technologies
with bidirectionally connected apps, better AJAX -y
interactions, easire layout and styling (CSS3) and HTML 5
parser.
Firefox 4 will also feature native multimedia capabilities
including animation of wen content (CSS transitions, SMIL),
animation API, high-quality video and audio playback and
faster 2D drawing and possible 3D capabilities.
Developing tools will incude the Firebug compatibility,
remote Javascript debugger, web console, web inspector and
a new profile manager.
The new Firefox 4 platform will also be more secure and
will be optimized for today's hardware, supporting graphics
compositing with layers, hardware acceleration using
Direct2D, support for multitouch and integration for Aero
Peek.
Firefox 4 is expected to reach the RCI version in October,
and its final version will me available a month later.
Notice that these plans are fluid and are likely to change.
As with past releases, Mozilla uses dates to set targets
for milestones, and then its team work together to track to
those targets.