"Performance is a huge, huge, huge thing for us," said Mike Beltzner, vice president of engineering for Firefox, in a Webcast on Tuesday about plans for the browser. "We created the performance story, and we've got to keep at it."
Among other features planned for Firefox 4--and Mozilla emphatically cautions that plans can change--are support for high-speed graphics and text through Direct2D on Windows; a tidier user interface with more prominent and powerful tabs; support for several newer Web technologies; 64-bit versions; and compatibility with multitouch interfaces.
Performance means any number of things in a browser. Among them: the time it takes to launch the program or to load a Web page, the responsiveness of the user interface to commands such as opening new tabs, and the speed with which Web-based JavaScript programs execute. Firefox programmers also will work on more perceptual speed improvements, Beltzner said, such as changing the order that Web page elements appear on the screen and the appearance of the page-loading progress bar.
First, there's new energy in competitors including Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome from Web powerhouse Google. Second, making abrupt changes is harder without ruffling feathers among its large user base--Firefox accounts for roughly a quarter of the browser usage worldwide. Third, Firefox is expanding from PCs to mobile phones and tablets with very different hardware requirements. Last, a long list of new technologies are profoundly transforming browsers into a foundation for Web applications, but many of those advancements are far from settled.
Beltzner recognizes the challenges.
"We are in it to win it," Beltzner said. "It's no longer the case where it's all easy wins. There's hard work to be done here. We have to make sure we're the ones leading the charge in keeping the Web open for users."
Mozilla established a Firefox 3.6, 3.7, and 4.0 release plan in 2009, but the organization warned early this year that the browser schedule was changing. Tuesday's Webcast offered a new schedule with no Firefox 3.7.
Why the road map change? One key feature of 3.7 called out-of-process plug-ins, which moves plug-ins such as Adobe Systems' Flash Player to their own separate memory area for better stability, was advanced to Firefox 3.6.4, code-named Lorentz and in beta testing right now. Meanwhile, Mozilla concluded it needed more time for a planned user-interface overhaul and to be liberated by a "rebooted" plan for a new extensions foundation called Jetpack.
The heart of Web programming is Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and Mozilla is building into Firefox a new HTML5 "parser," the part of the browser that interprets the Web page code. The new parser can handle Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and mathematical equations interleaved with the rest of a Web page, runs as a separate computing process to improve browser responsiveness, and fixes "dozens" of longstanding bugs on the previous parser, Mozilla said.
