Mozilla Reveals Firefox 4 Plans

Barence writes "Mozilla has given a breakdown of its plans for Firefox 4. Perhaps the most striking change to Firefox 4 is the user interface, which takes a great deal of inspiration from Google Chrome. 'Something UI designers have known for a long time is that the simpler an interface looks, the faster it will seem,' said director of Firefox Mike Beltzner during the presentation. Also mooted was the ability to give applications such as Gmail and Twitter their own permanent tabs for easy access, and the introduction of a 'switch to tab' button, allowing power users running hundreds of tabs to quickly find the one they want. Beltzner said Mozilla was also looking at replicating Chrome's tactic of silently updating the browser in the background, removing the annoying wait when Firefox first loads up."

Comments

Re:Finally surf the WWW with FFF

[chill]

You're probably thinking of "Fox Force Five", from Pulp Fiction

http://www.whysanity.net/monos/fox.html

Re:H.264 support?

[delinear]

h.264 and HTML5 aren't synonymous - HTML5 just provides a video container, the browser vendor decides what codecs to allow, so it's entirely possible to fully support HTML5 yet still have no h.264 support.

Video presentation.

[Anonymous Coward]

For those who don't want to rtfa, there's a video presentation on the director of firefox, Mike Beltzners blog: http://videos.mozilla.org/serv/air_mozilla/firefox4.ogg

Re:Menu Bar..?

[je ne sais quoi]

On any random day, I use the the print button under the file menu, the "save page as", preferences, zoom, history, bookmarks, in the tools menu I use the preferences for add-ons I've got. Occasional use include the "open file" in the file menu, view page source in the edit menu, and the about tab in the help menu. So maybe you don't use the menu bar but I do, just about every day. Removing it would really, really, really piss me off.

Re:Retarded

[dintlu]

It doesn't help that the linked article is terrible. A whole pile of performance updates are being made in addition to the UI changes:

JagerMonkey
HTML5 Parser off main thread
64 bit support
Startup timeline optimizations
Reduced I/O operations on main thread
JS threads and GC
DOM Performance improvements
Layers for compositing, scrolling

+

Graphics compositing with Layers
Hardware acceleration using Direct3D
Multitouch support
Aero Peek integration
OSX integration

I'd suggest reading the actual presentation for more information:
http://beltzner.ca/mike/2010/05/10/firefox-4-fast-powerful-and-empowering/

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[fast turtle]

More likely it's Adblock causing the problem. I've run a Firefox with Noscript only for the last 1.5 yr (Win7-64/RC>-Retail Win7-64) and have had no crashes due to any extensions. I have had crashes due to Plug-ins such as Flash/Quicktime/WMP but that's been endemic to the OS itself.

I personally gave up on Adblock since it was slowing FF down simply due to the number of blocks I had. After Entered most of them into the Hosts file, I was able to get rid of it and go discovered that NoScript configured to disable flash/silverlight and everything else worked as well if not better then the combo of Noscript/Ablock.