Firefox 4, and what to expect in upcoming releases of Firefox 3

Don't get your hopes up. Firefox 4 isn't coming out around the corner. Mike Beltzner simply announced his vision for the next upcoming major release of Firefox. What does he have in mind, you may be eager to know? Well, nothing very specific. Good intentions are a great start though, right?

Fast: making Firefox super-duper fast

Powerful: enabling new open, standard Web technologies (HTML5 andbeyond!).

Empowering: putting users in full control of their browser, data, and Web experience.

Upcoming versions of Firefox 3 are more out in the open. You can expect some of the following major updates in future firefox. In Firefox 3.6.4, you can expect Firefox to finally take a step into the security spotlight by stealing a security feature Chrome has been using for a long time.

"Uninterrupted Browsing" is the term, and if Flash, Quicktime, or Silverlight are crashing your browser, they will simply crash instead, leaving you free to continue browsing or reload to try again.

Quote from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.6.4/releasenotes/

"Firefox 3.6.4 provides uninterrupted browsing for Windows and Linux users when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins.

If a plugin crashes or freezes, it will not affect the rest of Firefox. You will be able to reload the page to restart the plugin and try again."

In addition. I have done some beta testing of the Firefox beta. The specific version is 3.7a5pre-release. Some of the notable things I see in this release are a change to the interface, and a brand new way to handle your addons. In the future, according to this pre-release anyway, you will use about:addons as your browser URL to manage your addons. What we're looking at is the death of the traditional addons.mozilla.org web-page and it's reincarnation in a more sophisticated, user friendly form.

I took the liberty of taking a screen-shot of both of these obvious changes to the new version. The operating used at the time was Windows XP, as I was in a work environment. I do however support the use of less obsolete operating systems.

http://img91.imageshack.us/img91/4061/95008296.jpg