14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla is moving forward with plans to deliver a total of 10 Beta development milestones for the next iteration of its open source browser.
Having released Firefox 4.0 Beta 9 recently, the browser maker is now focusing on the next testing release, Beta 10.
Mozilla needs to get Beta 10 out the door as soon as possible, if it’s going to make a late February 2011 launch deadline for Firefox 4.0, but it also has to deal with quite a consistent number of bugs that still impact the project.
“The schedule for Beta 10 has not been finalized. The planning team has proposed a Friday (2011-01-21) code freeze and is waiting to hear from the Firefox and Platform leads to see if that's [going to] work.
“There are over 90! hard blocker fixes that have happened since we froze for beta 9 and those fixes need to get out into testing sooner rather than later.
“We currently stand at 225 soft blockers and 97 hard blockers. Hard blockers are _the_ priority for all of Mozilla engineering right now,” revealed Asa Dotzler, community coordinator for Firefox marketing projects.
In case you’re not familiar with Mozilla dev lingo, a hard blocker is a bug that’s severe enough to prevent shipping a release.
Even if just because of a single hard blocker, Mozilla will hold a release until the issue is fixed. Various critical problems including memory leaks, vulnerabilities, stability and reliability issues, performance and UI bugs, etc. can qualify as hard blockers.
In contrast, soft blockers are the kind of bugs that devs will decide that the users can live with until a routine maintenance update is provided.
Essentially, Mozilla needs to go through the 90+ hard blockers before it will ship Firefox 4.0, with the remaining bugs not being considered priorities.
“Mozilla reached another great milestone last Friday with the release of Firefox 4's ninth beta. Reactions from our testing community and the press have been the best yet for any of our betas, with many champing at the bit to see a release in February,” Dotzler added.
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.