According to PCMag.com, Firefox team leader Mike Beltzner announced the product’s plans for the near future, including goals and dates for changes to Firefox’s internals and user interface.
The article said after enjoying five years of substantial growth, Firefox has stalled in the face of stiff competition from Google’s Chrome, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview Opera 10.5 and Apple’s Safari.
“It’s no longer the case where it’s all easy wins,” Beltzner said. “There’s hard work to be done here.”
Beltzner listed three main goals of the plan which include making Firefox faster, powerful, enabling new open standard web technologies (HTML5 and beyond) and empowering users to be in full control of their browser, data and web experience.
Beltzner said Firefox would be updated from 3.7 to 3.6, called 3.6.4. Both use plugins to run separate processes for improved stability and security. The target is to ship version four by the end of the year. A beta is planned to hit by the end of June and the final release should ship sometime next October to November.
Improving Firefox's speed was foremost among Beltzner's goals. The browser's next JavaScript engine, dubbed JägerMonkey, is the first line of attack.
Though Firefox has been an early supporter of HTML 5 video, it's gone with the less-polished and less-popular Ogg Theora format, where Apple, Microsoft, and Chrome have settled on support for the licensed H.264 video format, which enjoys widespread use on the Internet.
Syncing, better privacy controls and geolocation features are also on the table for Firefox 4. Like Opera's Link and Google's Sync, Mozilla's Weave Sync lets users synchronize bookmarks, history, saved passwords, open tabs to a server and all the users devices.
The new JetPack plugin system and a new extension manager will limit extensions' ability to affect the entire browser and make programming compatibly easier. Better on-page search with highlighting is also in development.