Today, I presented an early product plan for Firefox 4 to the Mozilla community (live, over the web!) to share our vision for the next version of Firefox, and what projects are underway to realize it. Then I invited everyone to get involved by joining our engineering or product development efforts.
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.
Usually software producers don’t present these sorts of plans in public until they’re finalized, but Mozilla is a little different. We work in the open, socializing our plans early and often to gather feedback and build excitement in our worldwide community. Not everyone could attend the presentation today, though, so I’m sharing the slides and video here as well.
That said: please understand that these plans are fluid and are likely to change. As with past releases, we use dates to set targets for milestones, and then we work together to track to those targets. We always judge each milestone release against our basic criteria of quality, performance, and usability, and we only ship when it’s ready.
If you have Firefox or a modern web browser that supports fully open HTML video, you can watch the presentation.
If you’d just like to thumb through the slides yourself, I’ve put them up on SlideShare:
As always we’re interested in your feedback. Use Rypple, or leave a comment here, or if you have specific thoughts about Firefox or our platform development you can join the discussion in:
All features and techniques are great, but the single Firefox killing issue that needs to be addressed with nr 1 priority is startup-time. First startup takes 10 to 20 seconds. That is TOO MUCH if you just want to start working. I’m a Firefox lover because it’s open source and because of the plug-ins, but it’s only idealism that keeps me using it, despite the waiting pains. Amongst our developer team I’m the only one using FF as default, the rest disdainfully does away with it with the single argument: “too slow”. Fortunately I’ve got Firefox preloader, that reduced the pain dramatically. But such functionality should be included in FF self. All great functions and behind the scenes techniques are useless if people simply don’t use FF because it takes them too long to get it up and running. PLEASE get the startup time fixed or FF will lose the race.A Firefox lover.
+1
I wonder I wonder I wonder…
Will the developers of Firefox eventually consider us admins and give us a decent packaging and central management tool, and/or built-in scripting support!?
I guess not as all Firefox seem to care about are consumers and not the people who have to look after these monsters!
Love management systems. Love IE. Hate Firefox!
How does one get a copy of firefox 4 to test
Stop trying to be Chrome with the UI. FF has a useful, flexible UI – don’t emss with it. If I (and I speak for virtually all my coworkers as well) FF becomes another Chrome, we’ll all just move to Opera or some thing else. Change for the sake of it or to be like the flashy new kid on the block is NOT a good reason. Stop trying to fix what isn’t broken. Optimize memory and CPU usage and add rendering features but leave the UI alone. Speed is always nice but I hadn’t notice FF was particualarly slow.
Awesome examples, gonna bookmark this for later use when I will create my own comments form