14 DAY TRIAL // The forth Beta development milestone for the next iteration of Mozilla’s open source browser is currently available for download. Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 was already offered to heavyweight testers as a nightly, preview build via the browser maker’s FTP servers, and was followed shortly by the fully-fledged Beta 4 bits. In fact, Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox at Mozilla had announced early yesterday that the nightly Builds had already been offered to early adopters and that the full Beta was scheduled to follow. Mozilla managed to live up to the promise and users can now grab the complete Firefox 3.6 Beta 4. And not just the nightly release.
Just to be clear, Mozilla has yet to announce the official launch of Firefox 3.6 Beta 4, however, the bits are already live and can be downloaded via the link at the bottom of this article. With the Beta 3 release Firefox 3.6 had grown to over 450,000 testers, according to statistics released by the open source browser maker. Still, it appears that half a million beta testers is simply not enough, as Mozilla is aiming to reach at least 600,000 if not 750,000.
“We've built and are spot checking a fourth beta containing over 140 changes that landed in the past week,” Mozilla revealed. Users that want to wait for the official launch announcement from Mozilla will be able to see it soon enough, seeing how it is scheduled to go live today.
At the same time, the availability of Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 this late in November means that Mozilla missed its initially planned availability deadline for the Release Candidate milestone. Firefox 3.6 RC should have been made available by the end of this month, to catalyze the final release of the next version of the open source browser to be offered in December 2009.
Mozilla noted that with Firefox 3.6 RC it “missed code freeze, driving to finish by late this week. New Fennec dependencies and regressions are the primary source of blockers. Builds should be available first week of December. Target for release is now early December.”
This means that testers won’t be able to see Firefox 3.6 RC until early December at best, a move which implies that the final release of Firefox 3.6 could slip into early 2010.
Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 for Mac OS X is available for download here. Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 for Linux is available for download here.