14 DAY TRIAL // The wait, and it has been quite a wait, is almost over for the seventh Beta release of Firefox 4.0. However, early adopters will need to exercise their patience a tad longer, as Mozilla refines the release. Ahead of October 26th, 2010, the open browser vendor still had to resolve a total of 11 blockers that were preventing the release of Firefox 4.0 Beta 7.
And while it sounds like most of the work is done, fact is that the bugs need to be fixed, and this has to happen without causing any regression issues, which will only cause further delays for the development milestone which was supposed to be launched over a month ago.
“Of those 11 bugs, 2 are fixed on TraceMonkey, 2 are waiting Checkin, 3 are tracking a single issue (JSD & Firebug), and 2 are tracking items. That leaves only two items (a common crash in @ JSString::flatten() and partial incompatibility with the JetPack SDK) to be resolved, and progress is being made.
“Any help on those remaining two issues would be greatly appreciated,” revealed Mozilla’s director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner.
Back in September 2010, somewhere between Beta 6 and Beta 7 the Firefox 4.0 project was serious derailed.
Mozilla was planning to release Beta 7 in mid-September and Beta 8 at the start of October 2010.
With November just a week away, it’s clear that Firefox 4.0 has suffered a delay. By the most reserved estimates, users can expect the release of Firefox 4.0 to be postponed by at least 1 month and a half, of not even more.
Mozilla still has to confirm the Firefox 4.0 delay officially, but the company should have already had Firefox 4.0 Release Candidate (RC) ready for testing, which obviously, is not the case, especially with the browser vendor still working to release the Beta 7 Build.
“Once we're done with these blockers, we will be in a position to ship Firefox 4 Beta 7. At that point, we will need to decide whether or not to create builds from the Beta 7 "relbranch" we created on October 6th, as opposed to simply shipping a release based off of mozilla-central,” Beltzner added.
In this context, I think it’s rather safe to assume that Firefox 4.0 will be wrapped up and delivered to users sometime in the first half of 2011, but certainly not by the end of 2010, as Mozilla intended initially.
Firefox 4 Beta 6 for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 4 Beta 6 for Linux is available for download here.
Firefox 4 Beta 6 for Mac is available for download here.