Mozilla is offering early adopters the first taste of the fifth Beta of Firefox 4.0. Testers can now download the Release Candidate builds of Firefox 4.0 Beta 5 from Mozilla’s FTP servers. Users should be advised that Firefox 4.0 Beta 5 is nothing more than a nightly Build at this point in time and thus not suited for deployment in production environments, but rather reserved for testing.
At the time of this article only the Mac OS X and Linux flavors of Firefox 4.0 Beta 5 Candidate were available for download.
However, Windows users should monitor Mozilla’s FTP servers, since it bound that the Windows releases of the ‘almost-baked’ Firefox 4.0 Beta 5 will also go live soon enough.
Initially, Mozilla had considered Firefox Beta 5 as the feature freeze milestone for the successor of Firefox 3.6.
But apparently, the browser vendor decided against this move, and postponed feature freeze to
September 10th.
Obviously, Firefox Beta 5 will be followed by Beta 6, which is planned for delivery in the first half of September 2010.
I say obviously, because Mozilla planned quite a consistent number of Beta releases for its next major version of Firefox, setting the pace at one every couple of weeks or so.
Following the release of Firefox 4.0 Beta 3, Mozilla reveled that in order to not suffer a penalty from public perception, all future Beta releases of the next iteration of the open source browser would no longer feature a number attached to them.
Essentially the browser vendor is attempting to avoid the perception that the development process is inefficient, especially as it plans to deliver no less than 7 Beta builds of Firefox 4.0, although they could be more.
Mozilla continues to push for an October or November general availability date for Firefox 4.0, and as such it is even
prepared to make some sacrifices, by cutting features in order to make the deadline.
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.
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