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Firefox lead developer Mike Beltzner confirmed some features for Firefox 4 during a talk at Air Mozilla yesterday. Expect new looks and more control.
The public discussion of the development roadmap is to encourage talk among the community, he noted. Planned for the latest release are various changes, including more user control, HTML5 support, a streamlined default theme, and faster navigation. At the same time, most Firefox users will benefit from the performance improvements in version 4.0, as well as enjoy the speedier startup and shutdown processes.
Beltzner outlined the top priorities in a blog post that included his presentation. He wrote that the primary goals include making Firefox 4 faster, while enabling support for open standards (HTML5) and empowering users with full control over their browser, data, and overall Web experience.

“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,” Beltzner explained.
You can take a test drive by installing Firefox 3.7 Alpha 5 [Link]. Once it is ready, the Alpha branch will shift to version 4.0.