The road to perfection is never a short one – something Mozilla intends on nearing with the publication of news that avid Firefox browser users can probably look forward to the release Firefox 4.o in November this year, plus a beta version lurking around the corner in June.

It’s no secret that everyone who’s anyone uses Firefox, no big surprise then that, what with everyone giving their tuppenceworth on what could be improved, tweaked added etc. that the head honchos over at Mozilla will appeal to popular demand. Contrary to the more bugfix nature of Firefox 3.6 and the pending 3.7 (soon to be re-dubbed version 3.6.4, offering bugfixes for crashes caused by certain plugin installations), 4.0 is planned to offer its users a new “less is more” look to their browsing experience – Quite similar to Labour’s new approach……..depending on how you look at it!

Same tech, different packing

It’s not rocket science – the less user has to digest what’s going on, the more he/she notices how fast it’s doing it. Thanks to his open approach Mike Beltzner, lead Firefox developer, we’ve already got quite a  bit of information from online discussions and info from Mike’s blog. Beltzner explained how in general the browser should become a lot less bulky – less buttons and menu options, more pure content, tab reduction by adding a “switch to tab” tool, enabling simplified browsing between tabs as well. The “home” button will also be replaced by an easy to reach application tab.

Behind the scenes

A lot of work is being put into the back end of the browser prior to its beta release as well. Modal dialogues will be gotten rid of, reducing interruptions at startup. Existing dialogues should be replaced by message bubbles relative to individual tabs, allowing the user to navigate to other parts of the browser on pop-up. Ideally, Beltzner would like a lot of the update action to take more of a back seat, happening automatically in the background. Lots of thought is going into a new add-on manager, allowing users to install extensions without the disturbing (although a matter of a few seconds, and previous pages are automatically relaoded anyway!) restart.

Sharing is caring

4.0 also focusses on tools for backing up and sharing data by integrating the existing Weave service from Mozilla. How exactly this will then look within the new design has yet to have been discussed, at least with the outside world! And a quick word on looks – yes, HTML5 is definitely on the tips of developer’s tongues with regards to styling, layout and general “fanciness”, in combination with CSS3.

Here’s a short presentation from Mike’s blog on the new browser: