Firefox 4.0 Beta 12 Planned for Next Week

 Mozilla is closer than ever to the last Beta development milestone of the next iteration of its open source browser.

According to Asa Dotzler, Mozilla Director of Community, the twelfth Beta of Firefox 4.0 is scheduled for launch in the week of February 28th, 2011.

If all goes well, the open source browser vendor will be able to produce Firefox 4.0 Beta 12 as early as February 28, but the release could also slip into March 2011.

“Firefox 4 beta 12 went to builds last night (2011-02-22) and will be delivering our final set of sometimes scary changes to millions of beta testers.

“This final (!!!) beta contains fixes to more than 200 hard and soft blockers. If all goes well with QA and nightly feedback, we'll be shipping our last Firefox 4 beta early next week; Monday or Tuesday would be ideal.

“After today's round of triage, we stand at 26 remaining blockers for Firefox 4 RC. Over half of those have patches in some state of evaluation,” Dotzler added.

Firefox 4.0 is still not quite ready for release just yet, but Mozilla is already serving a preview of Beta 12 to early adopters and the first Release Candidate is soon to follow in March.

At this point in time there’s no telling when Firefox 4.0, a browser which was supposed to be release no later than November 2010, will be finalized.

If no regression issues are discovered following the availability of Firefox 4.0 Beta 12 chances are that the final release will come by the end of March 2011.

However, if additional severe bugs are discovered, introduced by the latest series of fixes, then Firefox 4.0 could very well be delayed yet again.

Mozilla launched a website which is designed to count down the number of hard blockers preventing the release of Firefox 4.0.

At the time of this article the answer to the “Can we ship yet” was still “No” with some 18 issues needing to be resolved.

Firefox 4.0 Beta 11 for Windows is available for download here.

Firefox 4.0 Beta 11 for Linux is available for download here.

Firefox 4.0 Beta 11 for Mac is available for download here.