Its time for Firefox 4

Ladies and Gentlemen, its time for the beginning of a new era of  Firefox, one of the most popular opensource applications. Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's Director of Firefox, shared the organization's plan about the next big thing, Firefox 4, in a presentation last week. As it seems, Firefox 4 aims to be faster, in both looks and performance, sleek and light interface, various improvements to enhance the user experience.

The major changes that are going to take place in Firefox 4 are motivated from its user base.  As Mike addresses, this time they are not just thinking about the end users, Firefox 4 will come with a lot of tools and new integrated technologies to help out web developers too.

Firefox 4 for end users

Developers aim to bring a simpler, faster and cleaner interface to user in Firefox 4. It aims to enhance user experience with no modal dialogs, updates will be taken care of in background and faster navigation.

The customization will take a new turn too. Dedicated application and customization tabs - addons manager, will make life easier for users. And the best part, addons installation won't require a restart .

As Mike noted, Firefox was built for the computers and Operating systems released many years ago. So, in order to improve the speed and user experience, Firefox 4 will include support for hardware acceleration, multi-touch and various such technologies.

Firefox 4 for web developers

With addons like web developer, firebug, greasemonkey etc. Firefox is a haven for web developers making them a big and prominent part of Firefox User base. And this time Firefox developers are also planning to improve the web development environment under Firefox 4. This will include the integration of latest web technologies - HTML5, CSS3, Websockets etc. native multimedia capabilities and better development tools -  Web Console, Web Inspector, more compatible firebug and a lot more.

Here are the slides presented by Mike Beltzner.