Mike Beltzner, Director of Firefox, presented a slide show to the Mozilla community, outlining possible new features planned for Firefox 4, although he was careful to warn that the feature set was far from final.

The slide show, which can be viewed here on SlideShare, starts with groundbreaking research questions, such as “who uses Firefox?” and “what are those people trying to do?”, leading to the revolutionary conclusions that “speed, power and control” should be central to the browsing experience.

Insightful industry analysis aside, the Firefox team has broken down it’s key demographic to two key areas, Users and Developers. Explicitly targeting each group, Firefox 4 aims to be faster, cleaner and simpler, with improvements to the Awesome Bar and a revamped extensions manager.

As a Mac user, I’m hoping Firefox eventually plans to match Safari and Google’s Chrome in providing a more Mac-friendly user experience. Sure, it’s easier to simply port code to various operating systems, but while the competition is already doing a better job Firefox will always lag behind in this area.

Source: Boy Genius Report