Mozilla gave developers a heads-up Monday on its plans to release a new version of Firefox featuring advanced HTML5 capabilities. Reacting to the recent market-share success of Google’s lightning-fast Chrome browser, Mozilla said one of the priorities for its forthcoming Firefox 4 release is to make the next-generation browser “super-duper fast.”
With Firefox 4, the ultimate aim for Mozilla is to develop a technology base that is fast, secure and optimized, noted Firefox Director Mike Beltzner. “For users, we want to build a product that is fast, friendly and empowering,” Beltzner told the Mozilla developer community on Monday. “For developers, we want to give them tools for capable, fast Web access.”
Overcoming Flat Growth
However, it’s not just the next version of Firefox that needs to be fast. The Firefox development team needs to hustle because Chrome growth in the global browser market has been outpacing all its rivals for the past several months.
According to the latest data from Net Applications, Chrome increased its market share to 6.7 percent in April — which is about five percentage points higher than it was a year ago. Moreover, Google Chrome has been the major beneficiary of Microsoft’s weakness in the browser market over the course of the past 12 months, a role that Firefox used to enjoy.
The global market share held by Internet Explorer hit a 12-month low of 59.95 percent at the end of April, and over that period Chrome received the lion’s share of Microsoft’s percentage slide. Meanwhile, Mozilla’s share of the browser market in April continued to hover at 23.8 percent, up only slightly from April 2009.
Beltzner hopes the addition of advanced capabilities to Firefox 4 like HTML5, 64-bit computing support, and reduced I/O operations on the main thread will help. However, none of these advancements will do anything to…