The document discusses the key changes in Rails 4.0. Some of the major new features include strong parameters for mass assignment protection, streaming responses using ActionController::Live, background job handling via ActiveSupport::Queue, and routing concerns to DRY up routes. Some existing features that have been improved include ActiveRecord::Relation to allow chaining of queries, caching with cache digests to automatically invalidate caches, and various performance improvements. A number of older and deprecated features have also been removed.