14 DAY TRIAL // The near-final Build of Firefox 4.0 has now gone live and is available to early adopters worldwide for testing. Firefox 4.0 Release Candidate (RC1) might very well be the final development milestone of Mozilla’s next generation open source browser.
It has certainly taken the browser vendor quite some time to get Firefox 4.0 to the RC phase, after numerous delays, which managed to push back the release deadline from October / November 2010 well into 2011.
It now appears that even in a worst case scenario, namely that showstoppers (severe bugs) are identified in Firefox 4.0 RC1,Mozilla will be able to provide the final release of Firefox 3.6’s successor by the end of March 2011.
“Mozilla Firefox 4 for Windows, Mac and Linux has exited the beta cycle and is now available as a release candidate in more than 70 languages,” a member of the Mozilla team stated.
“The millions of users testing Firefox 4 will be automatically updated to this version and will join our Mozilla QA team in validating the new features, enhanced performance and stability and HTML5 capabilities in Firefox 4.”
There are no new features or major changes in Firefox 4.0 RC1 compared to Beta 12, nor that any should have been introduced.
Mozilla’s focus of getting Firefox 4.0 from Beta to RC was entirely on resolving issues that still plagued the browser.
“We build Firefox with help from our contributors and millions of beta testers. The team has fixed more than 8,000 bugs since the first beta release,” the Mozilla team member added.
According to the browser maker, no need for a second Release Candidate of Firefox 4.0 has been identified at this point in time.
Testers running Firefox 4.0 RC1 might in fact be running the final development milestone of the browser. And with no Firefox 4.0 RC2 in the plans, the final version is bound to be offered to end users quite soon.
Firefox 4.0 Release Candidate (RC1) for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Release Candidate (RC1) for Linux is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Release Candidate (RC1) for Mac is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6.15 and Firefox 3.5.17 for Windows are available for download here.