14 DAY TRIAL // The next Beta development milestone for Firefox 4.0 is planned for the week of September 6th, 2010. In fact, Mozilla noted during the latest Firefox Planning meeting that it is targeting Monday September 6th for the release, but obviously, this deadline is by no means set in stone.
The previous Beta Builds of Firefox 4.0 have suffered small delays on more than one occasion, and of course, there’s always the chance that this could happen again.
But even in a worst case scenario, early adopters will only see Firefox 4.0 Beta 5 postponed by just a few days and nothing more.
At this point in time early adopters can already download a Candidate of Firefox 4.0 Beta 5. This is a nightly Build and offers a preview of the full Beta, but it is not Beta 5, as Mozilla has still some work to do before it will push the milestone to testers.
Initially, the upcoming Beta was planned to synonymous with the feature freeze of Firefox 4.0, namely the moment when Mozilla would have decided on the feature set for the browser which would also make it into the final version.
However, as I already noted, feature free has been postponed to September 10th, 2010.
Moreover, Mozilla has started slimming down Firefox 4.0, cutting Account Manager from the browser in order to make the late 2010 release deadline.
But while additional features have also been deemed at risk, Mozilla has yet to confirm that it will cut any more features from, Firefox 4.0.
In this regard, Firefox 4.0 Beta 6 will most likely be the first feature complete release of the next iteration of the open source browser.
This means that although small tweaks and optimizations will still be introduced, the feature set in Firefox 4.0 Beta 6 will be final.
The plan is to finalize Firefox 4.0 by the end of 2010, with a release date set for October or November.
At this point in time Mozilla has to deliver at least three more Beta Builds, as it planned a total of seven when the development process started.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 4 for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 4 for Mac OS X is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 4 for Linux is available for download here.