Mozilla Outlines Product Plans For Firefox 4

Mozilla is looking for feedback after it began early work on Firefox 4, according to an executive who presented the upcoming browser version’s product plan 10 May.

Open Planning

“Usually software producers don’t present these sorts of plans in public until they’re finalised, but Mozilla is a little different,” Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s director of Firefox, wrote in a 10 May posting on his personal blog. “We work in the open, socialising our plans early and often to gather feedback and build excitement in our worldwide community.”

The primary goals for Firefox 4 will include making a “super-duper fast” browser that gives users a high degree of control, while enabling “new open, standard web technologies (HTML5 and beyond).” However, Beltzner added, “these plans are fluid and likely to change.”

In an accompanying slideshow, Beltzner detailed how the development of Firefox 3.7 had been motivated primarily by “out of process plugins” and the browser version eventually morphed into Firefox 3.6.4. This new Firefox version will improve on previous editions by presenting a more streamlined default theme, performance optimisations and faster navigation.

Change Of Direction

Mozilla’s development process for its browser franchise has undergone some twists and turns as of late. In March, the organisation announced that it would stop work on a version of Firefox for Windows Mobile, allegedly because of Microsoft’s forbidding the development of native applications for its upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series.

“We have been building a version of Firefox for Windows Mobile for quite a while, with the expectation that Microsoft would be doubling down in the mobile market and hoping they would put out a great new mobile operating system,” Stuart Parmenter, Mozilla’s director of Mobile, wrote in a 22 March posting on the Blog.Pavlov.Net blog. For that build, Mozilla had been using Windows CE6, the underlying platform for the Windows Phone 7 Series, which is expected to make its debut near the end of 2010.

Mozilla saw itself as “well positioned to have an awesome browser on Windows Phone 7,” Parmenter added, until Microsoft apparently decided to “close off development to native applications” on the new platform.

“Because of this, we won’t be able to provide Firefox for Windows Phone 7 at this time,” Parmenter wrote. “Given that Microsoft is staking their future in mobile on Windows Mobile 7 (not 6.5) and because we don’t know if or when Microsoft will release a native development kit, we are putting our Windows Mobile development on hold.”

Market Share

Firefox currently occupies some 24.59 percent of the traditional browser market worldwide, according to analytics firm Net Applications, lagging behind Microsoft Internet Explorer at 59.95 percent but well ahead of Chrome, at 6.73 percent, and Safari, at 4.72 percent.