14 DAY TRIAL // The ninth Beta development milestone of Firefox 4.0 is now available for download. Although Mozilla has yet to announce officially the general availability of Firefox 4.0 Beta 9, the bits are already live on the company’s FTP servers.
Softpedia readers have been able to read about the imminent launch of Firefox 4.0 Beta 9 since last week, and again yesterday when Damon Sicore, Mozilla senior director of platform engineering revealed that Firefox 4.0 Final was due by the end of February 2011.
Beta 9 is toward the end of the Beta development program for Firefox 4.0, and as such, customers should not expect extensive changes, simply because there aren’t any.
According to the open source browser maker, here are the most consistent modifications compared to Beta 8:
“•Overhaul of the bookmarks and history code, enabling faster bookmarking and startup performance;
•Per-compartment garbage collection is now enabled, reducing work done during complex animations.”
At this point in time, the focus with the development process of Firefox 4.0 is to soften all the rough edges of the open source browser and get it ready for release.
Mozilla is no longer introducing any major changes or new features. In fact, early adopters running Firefox 4.0 Beta 9 today get to experience pretty much the same browser as when version 4.0 will be finalized and offered to end users.
The Firefox 4.0 project still has another Beta to produce, Mozilla revealed. However, at the time of this article, the launch deadline for Firefox 4.0 Beta 10 had yet to be announced.
Mozilla is planning to push Firefox 4.0 extremely fast to Beta 10 and then to the Release Candidate (RC) stage.
As Sicore noted this week, the push is indicative of an attempt to wrap up Firefox 4.0 and have it release by the end of February 2011.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 9 for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 9 for Linux is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 9 for Mac is available for download here.