The folks at Mozilla finally unveiled a new roadmap for Firefox, which has been vague after the release of Firefox 3.6. Where first were talks of Firefox 3.7 and Firefox 4.0, there is now only one.

Logically the one to survive is Firefox 4.0, which is aimed to be released this year. Firefox 3.7 is no more, and the top changes of that release are scattered around other releases. For instance Firefox 3.6.4 actually contains the plug-in process separation (like Safari 4), while the theme changes require more time and will appear in Firefox 4.

With the increased competition from Chrome and Opera, but also Internet Explorer and Safari, several main goals have been set for the upcoming release. Being the second most popular web browser, that is not part of some major corporation can be though, but if most of the features will make it in the final release, there's still a lot going for.

First is of course the new theme. Firefox 4 will finally use Aero Glass in Windows Vista and 7 and less screen space, while the Mac release will look more like Safari or Finder, which less dominating buttons. Platform integration has been important for Firefox 3, but they surely lacked in the Windows department with this (Mac and Linux variants look decent).

Speed is the most important thing today, with Chrome and Opera fighting with each other for the speed king crown, Safari is always close by as a third. The team at Microsoft is working hard to unlock the power of the GPU to accelerate IE9 (which will also have a newish JavaScript engine), while WebKit developers work in silence on the upcoming WebKit2. Firefox made TraceMonkey in the later releases, but this engine simply couldn't compete directly in all the benchmarks with Chrome's V8, Opera's Carakan or Safari's Nitro. So instead the folks at Mozilla are looking at the competition, and what's that, they are actually thinking of using parts of WebKit's JavaScript engine (which Apple calls Nitro) to patch those nasty slow parts and dubbed it JaegerMonkey. But who said Microsoft couldn't innovate? Firefox 4 for Windows will get Direct2D support to enhance rendering speed (something we might see in some later release in Opera through their Vega library.

Other changes that are planned for Firefox 4 are: Jetpack (a more simple extensions framework, that does not require reboots for instance), HTML5 and other new web technologies, a new add-on manager, Aero Peek, Aero overlays, 64-bit support, and much, much more.

According to the preliminary roadmap we can expect a first beta somewhere at the end of June, which will be followed by a long range of beta releases, with an expected release date in October/November. Exciting indeed, to see some really big changes from Mozilla!