Mozilla has stepped up to the plate with their launch of Firefox 4, which has now garnered well over 59 million downloads as of its launch on March 22nd. With App Tabs, much improved performance, and some incredible features like Panorama baked right in, I’ve adopted Firefox 4 as my browser of choice for the time being over Chrome and Safari. While I leave my love of WebKit behind (perhaps only temporarily), ConceivablyTech dug into the Firefox UX planning pages to give us a glimpse of what’s next for Firefox 5.

Some of the new features in development under Mozilla’s new 16-18 week release schedule include:

• Multi-select for tabs (think of grouping or closing multiple tabs at the same time)
• A new tab page which could be similar to Opera’s Speed Dial or Chrome’s New Tab Page
• Integrated PDF viewer and perhaps other integrated browsing or playback tools for a variety of formats
• An identity manager that can manage access across multiple websites
• Firefox 5 will a have a big focus on sharing (doesn’t the screenshot above look like Sparrow’s icon?) to services such as Facebook

Now that Firefox is finally out of their 3.0 stage, Mozilla is dedicated to stay on a consistent update schedule which means we should be seeing new features added regularly over the upcoming year. Firefox 5 should bring a lot of additions to differentiate from competitors such as Google Chrome, whose development cycle is not only short but consistently focuses on single users and simplifying the user experience. Mozilla’s goal with Firefox 5 will be to further integrate upcoming web projects into the browser, giving website owners the ability to activate custom features per “tab” in the browser for a more app-like web experience. You can read more about Firefox and its upcoming features by visiting the source link below.

[via ConceivablyTech]

Images via ConveivablyTech