Firefox 4 Coming Next Week

Mozilla’s Firefox 4, the latest offering of the second most popular Web browser in the world, will be officially released on March 22, 2011.

It’s been a long time coming. The first Firefox 4 beta was released July 6, 2010. At the time, Mozilla was aiming to deliver a release candidate this past autumn.

Launching several months late isn’t ideal but Google’s release practices have made Firefox’s tardiness look worse. Google launched Chrome 5 on May 21, 2010. On March 8, 2011, Google released Chrome 10. Is Firefox now five generations behind Chrome? Hardly. The four major Web browsers — Chrome 10, Firefox 4, Internet Explorer 9, and Safari 5 — are more comparable and competitive than ever before.

Johnathan Nightingale, director of Firefox development, says Firefox has more than 400 million users worldwide and a 30% global market share.

NetApplications, an Internet metrics company, suggest that figure is closer to 22% and flat, if not falling. The most significant number Nightingale cites is six: “Firefox 4 is fast,” he said. “It’s blazing fast. Six times faster than any Firefox we’ve done before.”

Other browser makers make similar claims too, though some of those claims are more actively disputed than others, like Microsoft’s assertions about hardware acceleration.  Read more……