Mozilla plans to ship a beta of its new Firefox 4 browser as early as next month, which will eventually be followed-up by a final version before the end of November. Mike Beltzner, the director of Firefox, earlier this week spent 50 minutes running through the product timeline as well as the specific features that the company plans to pack into this new iteration of Firefox.

Rival browsers such as Chrome have seen steady performance enhancements, with even Microsoft demonstrating Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview's ability to perform hardware acceleration via the use of the GPU. On this front, Beltzner gave his assurance that performance is one of the key focuses of the upcoming upgrade, noting that "Performance is a huge, huge, huge thing for us. We created the performance story, and we've got to keep at it.

The strategy to increase the speed of Firefox involves cranking up its raw performance, and also in tweaking the browser so as to enhance the perception of speed. Ironically, part of the plan to address the latter involves simplifying the user interface to something akin to Chrome--with fewer buttons overall and the tabs located above the address bar.

Another prominent technology enhancement under the hood would be "Lorentz," which essentially protects Firefox from crashes by third party plug-ins such as Adobe Flash. Because plug-ins will now (finally) run as separate processes, instabilities in errant plug-ins will no longer bring down the entire browser. Also, Mozilla is hoping that a future version of Firefox will be able to update itself in the background even as it continues running.

There are other enhancements mentioned of course, though they are hardly cast in stone at this point. You can view the presentation here if you are interested.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Computerworld
- check out this article at PC World
- check out this article at PC Mag 

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