Firefox 4 release plan: the need for speed

Mozilla hopes to release Firefox 4 in October or November, a new version that has speed among its top goals.

"Performance is a huge, huge, huge thing for us," said Mike Beltzner, vice president of engineering for Firefox, in a Webcast on Tuesday about plans for the browser. "We created the performance story, and we've got to keep at it."

Among other features planned for Firefox 4--and Mozilla emphatically cautions that plans can change--are support for high-speed graphics and text through Direct2D on Windows; a tidier user interface with more prominent and poweful tabs; support for several newer Web technologies; 64-bit versions; and compatibility with multitouch interfaces.

Performance means any number of things in a browser. Among them: the time it takes to launch the program or to load a Web page, the responsiveness of the user interface to commands such as opening new tabs, and the speed with which Web-based JavaScript programs execute. Firefox programmers also will work on more perceptual speed improvements, he said, such as changing the order that Web page elements appear on the screen and the appearance of the page-loading progress bar.

Mozilla's Firefox 4 design shows tabs above the address bar and a home-page button replaced by a home tab.

(Credit: Mozilla)

Speed is one item on a long list of changes Mozilla has in mind for its five-year-old open-source Firefox browser. Improving Firefox is arguably a greater challenge now, though, for several reasons.

First, there's new energy in competitors including Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome from Web powerhouse Google. Second, making abrupt changes is harder without ruffling feathers among its large user base--Firefox accounts for roughly a quarter of the browser usage worldwide. Third, Firefox is expanding from PCs to mobile phones and tablets with very different hardware requirements. Last, a long list of new technologies are profoundly transforming browsers into a foundation for Web applications, but many of those advancements are far from settled down.

Beltzner recognizes the challenges.

"We are in it to win it," Beltzner said. "It's no longer the case where it's all easy wins. There's hard work to be done here. We have to make sure we're the ones leading the charge in keeping the Web open for users."

ozilla established a Firefox 3.6, 3.7, and 4.0 release plan in 2009, but the organization warned early this year that the browser schedule was changing. Tuesday's Webcast offered a new schedule with no Firefox 3.7.

Why the road map change? One key feature of 3.7 called out-of-process plug-ins, which moves plug-ins such as Adobe Systems' Flash Player to their own separate memory area for better stability, was advanced to Firefox 3.6.4, code-named Lorentz and in beta testing right now. Meanwhile, Mozilla concluded it needed more time for a planned user-interface overhaul and liberated by a "rebooted" plan for a new extensions foundation called Jetpack.

So what's the schedule? If al goes well, this:

"I think we need to get to a first beta by the end of June," before the Mozilla Summit in early July, he said. Releasing that version "puts us in a position where we can ship [the final version] somewhere in October or November."

Is it possible? Firefox 3.6 had been due in that time frame in 2009 and slipped into early 2010. "This is an aggressive schedule to be sure. We have to focus the efforts of projects already under way so it can come together to be a really great Firefox 4," Beltzner said. And programmers will have to prove the merit of any new projects very soon if they want them included.