With so many new browser releases coming out in such rapid succession, it stands to reason that at least some users are going to need some help figuring out which now works best for them.

Toward that end, I had a chat earlier today with Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla's director of Firefox development, to get a sense of what the final release of will bring. Here are some of the highlights of what we can expect.

1. More Speed

With its new , Firefox 4 delivers huge performance enhancements, Nightingale told me, including faster startup times, graphics rendering and page loads. In fact, in performance tests on the Kraken, SunSpider and V8 benchmarks, for example, Firefox 4 blew away previous versions of the browser, with performance results between three and six times better.

Firefox 4 also outdid Chrome 10, Opera 11.1 and Internet Explorer 9 in the Kraken benchmark, as GigaOM . Bottom line: It's blazingly fast.