Mozilla sets Firefox 4 release for November

Mozilla plans to ship a beta of Firefox 4 next month, and a final by the end of November, a company executive said yesterday.

In a 50-minute presentation, Mike Beltzner, the director of Firefox, spelled out not only the timeline for the next major upgrade, but also outlined the new features, changes and technology enhancements the company hopes to pack into the browser.

Beltzner also confirmed that Mozilla has dropped the idea of doing an interim edition, Firefox 3.7, which at one point last year it had slated for a mid-2010 release. Instead, the next version of Firefox 3.6 will include the primary feature once scheduled for Firefox 3.7, technology that splits some plug-in processes from the core browser.

That technology and associated project, dubbed “Lorentz,” prevents crashes by Adobe’s Flash, Apple’s QuickTime or Microsoft’s Silverlight plug-ins from bringing down the browser. The so-called “out of process plug-ins,” or OOPP as Mozilla calls the feature, will officially debut when Firefox 3.6.4 launches Thursday.

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