A look into the near future: Firefox 4

The Ajaxian blog and the Mozilla Hacks blog have blog entries on what the upcoming Firefox 4 will be.



Main news: Firefox 4 will be the final number of the alpha version of the browser, which was previously known to us as Firefox 3.7.



One of the major innovations of Firefox 3.7 (namely, the isolation of plug-ins into a separate process) was already released as part of Firefox 3.6.4.

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In addition to it, in Firefox 4 there are some new items:



→ SVG and MathML support right inside HTML5, without having to resort to strong XHTML and namespaces.



→ HTML5 interpreter in a separate stream, so the browser interface will not slow down when large pages are processed.



→ The HTML5 interpreter will support HTML5 forms.



→ Calling innerHTML will work faster (by about 20%).



→ WebSockets support (web applications will get full-duplex communication with the web server).



→ PushState will improve AJAX interaction.



→ New tools for interacting with web pages: gestures, multi-touch.



→ Improved support for CSS3.



→ Editable content of pages (contentEditable).



→ IndexedDB : structured JSON-like (and not SQLite-like, as it was before) data warehouse.



→ Interfaces for access to microphones and webcams of site visitors.



The Mozilla Hacks blog provides a demo of the new HTML + MathML + SVG:







The Ajaxian blog contains slides and videos of the presentation that Mike Beltzner (Firefox Director) read out. Since Habrahabr does not support insertion of SlideShare flash sliders, you will have to watch them in Ajaxian.