Firefox 4 plans revealed by Mozilla

Mozilla has revealed some early plans for the next version of its browser, Firefox 4.

In a presentation made this week, Mozilla's Mike Beltzner explained what had happened to Firefox 3.7 (it became Firefox 3.6.4, currently still in beta) and showed some of the new features that will be in Firefox 4.

Among the changes will be improved standards support and increased speed. The announcement comes days after Microsoft showed off a second preview version of Internet Explorer 9.

"Usually software producers don't present these sorts of plans in public until they're finalised, but Mozilla is a little different. We work in the open, socialising our plans early and often to gather feedback and build excitement in our worldwide community," said Beltzner.

"That said: please understand that these plans are fluid and are likely to change. As with past releases, we use dates to set targets for milestones, and then we work together to track to those targets. We always judge each milestone release against our basic criteria of quality, performance, and usability, and we only ship when it's ready," he continued.

There is a video of the presentation on Mozilla's site but be warned - it is 50 minutes long.