The next version of Mozilla’s popular web browser, Firefox 4, will finally include a 64-bit version, add more speed and possibly released in November this year.
The firs beta could be released as early as late June.
That’s the word from Mozilla Firefox director Mike Beltzner released last week.
While there was expected to be version 3.7 of the existing Firefox browser, the development team decided to roll the plugin update fixes into version 3.6.4 instead. Version 3.7 doesn’t look as though it will now see the light of day as focus now pushes towards version 4.
The major plan for Firefox 4 is a cleaner user interface that at least in some ways resembles Google Chrome with barely more than a web address entry panel and a series of tabs.
Support for HTML5 and CSS3 as well as new gesture interaction including multi-touch will be incorporated, getting the browser ready for the likely enslaught of tablet PCs and iPad-clones beginning to make their way out of China.
Multimedia will also see some adds with native video and audio support, faster 2D drawing and support for fullscreen use via an application programming interface (API) for developers.
The timeline for Firefox 4 at the moment is for the first beta to appear in late June, the first release candidate to come out mid-October with the final version appearing early November.
However, with Firefox 4 still in Alpha phase at time of publishing, there are still quite a few bridges for the development team to cross so while they’re talking about it, nothing is quite set in concrete just yet.
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#1 by Vijay on May 17, 2010 - 3:29 pm
Hmmm….I can’t wait till Nov! I wish FF could be as powerful as Chrome. Right now I am using Chrome for browsing and FF for web development.
It is hard to manage both the browsers at the same time. I had to make chrome as my default browser. So now I have to copy, paste, open each link in FF to firebug it. Again I have to right click on my files to open it with FF!
#2 by Nilambar on May 18, 2010 - 4:06 am
hmm looks nice. Waiting for it.
@Vijay:Can you point out some nice features in Chrome. I am using FF and loving it.
#3 by Vijay on May 18, 2010 - 2:46 pm
Well, Chrome plays video more smoothly, CSS animations are more smooth, CSS transformations are more anti-alias. Again webkit (Chrome’s renderer) has more CSS animation support than FF’s -moz.
The fact that each of the Chrome’s tab is a separate process makes it a better choice to browse web. Well you can find FF a bit stuck if you open a lot of tabs (with flash and animations in them).
Comparing the latest versions of each browser, Chrome supports more HTML5 features than FF.
It very easy to handle your bookmarks with Chrome, when you export (back-up) you get a HTML file with all the link in them! You cannot open FF’s bookmark back-up file.
On top of every thing Chrome has a neat layout, come on don’t you enjoy browsing/reading when the layout is neat….