Mozilla Publishes Plans for Firefox 4, Beta Due in June

The next version of Firefox is already in development, and Mozilla’s product director Mike Beltzner has posted his team’s vision of the shape Firefox 4 will take when it’s done.

The big news is that beta code is expected to ship next month, in June, and that Firefox 4 will hit the release candidate stage in October. Of course, those dates are subject to change (actually, change is almost guaranteed at this point), but that’s the plan as it stands now.

Beltzner outlines three key goals for Firefox 4: Making the browser faster, building up support for more powerful web standards like HTML5, and giving users full control over their online identities on the social web. That last one in particular is good news to us, as we’ve often advocated that identity belongs in the browser. Mozilla has been experimenting with different identity management techniques for the past year or so, and it’s good to see the company treating user identity as a primary “top 3″ feature. The whole web is social now, and it’s time the user agent starts really acting as the user’s agent.

Beltzner shared his slides, which I’ve embedded below. Also, if you’re using Firefox or another browser that supports native Theora video playback, you can watch this .ogg file.

Firefox 4: fast, powerful and empowering

View more presentations from Mike Beltzner.

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