14 DAY TRIAL // The first Release Candidate of Firefox 4.0 is just around the corner. Mozilla has wrapped up the twelfth Beta development milestone of the next major iteration of its open source browser ahead of schedule. While the browser maker was initially aiming to release Firefox 4.0 Beta 12 early next week, the bits are already available for download to early adopters.
Mozilla is yet to announce officially the launch the final Beta for Firefox 4.0, but downloads went live on the company’s FTP ahead of this weekend.
Of course, testers which were running Firefox 4.0 Beta 11 have started receiving automatic upgrades to Beta 12 through the browser's update mechanism.
As early adopters following the development process of Firefox 4.0 closely might know, the focus with this Build was on resolving a range of issues, more specifically, hard blockers, severe bugs which were preventing the browser from graduating to the RC stage.
Testers will notice that Firefox 4.0 is now more stable than ever, and that increased reliability has been paired with a boost in performance. According to Mozilla, compatibility improvements have also been baked into the latest Beta release.
Additional enhancements involve: “increased performance while viewing Flash content; improved plugin compatibility with hardware acceleration enabled; and hovering over links now displays the URL at the bottom of the window rather than in the location bar,” the browser vendor noted.
While at a certain time in the past, a Beta 13 appeared to be a valid possibility, this is no longer the case. The next development milestone to follow Beta 12 will be the Release Candidate, notes Damon Sicore, Mozilla Director of Platform Engineering.
“[On February 24th, 2011] we killed the blocker list, and we're down to 12 remaining bugs open, and only four remain without a patch. We set a goal last week to be done with all of these blockers and to try to be RC ready by [February 25th],” Sicore stated.
“Due to everyone's hard work, we're there. We've accelerated beta 12 to ship [February 25th], and the next step is to squash these few remaining bugs. After this, we're in RC mode, constantly watching the nomination queues for incoming bugs from this last beta.”
Firefox 4.0 Beta 12 for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 12 for Mac is available for download here.