Firefox 4 to be "fast, friendly and empowering"

Mozilla's Director of Firefox Mike Beltzner has outlined the organization's plan for Firefox 4. According to Beltzner, the mission is to make the browser "fast, friendly and empowering."

The current roadmap is for Firefox 4 to ship by November 2010. First off, Firefox 4 is Firefox 3.7 rebranded. Nothing wrong with that. However, given Mozilla's track record so far, this could well overshoot into 2011. The first beta is expected to be available by June and it is planned that there will be a new beta available every few weeks.

At the core of Firefox 4 will be speed - a "back to basics" move for the organization. The new browser will  incorporate projects such as JägerMonkey and will take advantage of hardware acceleration and multi-touch, as well as OS specific technologies such as Aero Peek in Windows 7.

Also planned is a 64-bit version of Firefox 4 for Windows 7 and Mac OS X.

There's also a new interface in the pipeline, designed to make the browser sleeker and faster. It seems that the new browser will take some design ideas from Google's Chrome and Opera.

Other new features will include a powerful permissions manager to allow users to manage what sites get access to what data, a new add-ons manager that allows extensions to be installed without restarting the browser, as well as loads of new shiny stuff for developers (such as HTML5, greater CSS3 support, 3D, a fullscreen API and an animation API).