Firefox 4 has launched! If you want to watch the whole planet upgrade in realtime head over to glow.mozilla.org (built by @potch, @jeffbalogh, and others!). If you haven't already downloaded Firefox 4 then what are you waiting for? After that, join the twitter party by using the #fx4 hashtag in your tweet.
You have a few good choices today if you want a fast, open web browser but Firefox 4 stands apart in many ways. Here is a short list of what it has done:
- brought high definition video to the Web using a free, open source encoder,
- given JavaScript heavy pages a 3-6x speed boost,
- continued to show that beautiful online applications and experiences can be created with HTML, CSS, JS and SVG,
- made it simple for users to take their web experience with them between computers,
- provided a way for users to opt-out of behavioral tracking,
- sped up graphics top to bottom with hardware acceleration and layers,
- made the user experience much faster, tighter, sleeker and more modern,
- brought 3D graphics to the Web,
- made countless security enhancements,
- and much, much, more.
As a Mozilla employee myself working on addons.mozilla.org it's an honor to work with so many people who are passionate about keeping the web free and open. As you can see from Glow it's especially humbling to see that Firefox is such an important tool to the international community. It validates the Mozilla mission that the web should be free and open and that users should be in control of the products they use (not large, for-profit corporations).
Where do we go next? Firefox 4 was a year in the making which is entirely too long to wait before releasing a product. So the Firefox team is moving to a rapid release schedule and here is a draft of how that might work. The goal is to get Firefox 5 out this summer and keep iterating on smaller, quicker releases in order to tighten the feedback loop.