Just a taste of Firefox 4.0 Beta 3 is all that users will be getting this week. The Candidates for the third Beta development milestone of Firefox 4.0 are now available for download from
Mozilla’s FTP servers. However, the releases offered by Mozilla are nothing more than nightly Builds, and not the actual Firefox 4.0 Beta 3, namely early previews which need more testing ahead of the official release. And of course, as some
of you might have guessed, the release of Firefox 4.0 Beta 3 has been delayed slightly.
Fact is that if all had gone according to plan, Firefox 4.0 Beta 3 would have been delivered tomorrow, August 6th, 2010. This is no longer the case. Code free has indeed been reached, however, Mozilla needed to deal with a severe regression issue involving Sync ahead of releasing the Beta. The browser vendor could of course had shipped Beta 3 without Sync, but instead choose to postpone the launch of Beta 3 for a few days.
In this regard, testers will most likely be getting the new Beta of Firefox 4.0 early next week. Of course, the browser maker has insisted all along that the development milestones of Firefox 4.0 are by no means set in stone. Every aspect of the Firefox 4.0 process could in fact change, including having features announced for delivery in the successor of Firefox 3.6 dropped from v4.0.
For the time being, early adopters that can exercise their patience until the fully-fledged Beta 3 for Firefox 4.0 is offered, can leverage the second Beta release (download links at the bottom of this article). Still, users need to be advised that this is pre-release software and as such it comes with inherent issues, such as the fact that App Tabs are lost after each session ends.
Update: grammar correction.Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 for Mac OS X is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 for Linux is available for download here.
Follow me on Twitter @MariusOiaga.
Find us on Google+
