14 DAY TRIAL // If all goes according to plan, Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 could be made available for download by the end of October 2010. Today it’s exactly one week since Mozilla delivered the last Beta development milestone of the next generation of its browser.
With the Firefox 4.0 project, Mozilla was hoping to deliver Beta Builds at a much faster pace, per the Google Chrome model.
And the open source browser vendor pretty much pulled it off for the first six Beta Builds. In fact, Mozilla was prolific enough that it actual decided not to attach numbers to the new Beta releases of Firefox in order to avoid damaging the browser’s image.
And beyond the earliest Betas of Firefox 4.0, Mozilla Director of Firefox Mike Beltzner and others started referring to the new releases simply as Beta updates.
But following the release of Firefox 4.0 Beta 6 Mozilla slowed down a tad. So much in fact, that whereas it was offering a new Beta every two to three weeks, it has now been a month since Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 is being built, and fact is that a few more weeks could pass before the Build is offered to early adopters for testing.
“Work on beta 7 continues, hoping to be able to go to builds early next week,” Mozilla revealed on October 13th.
And if Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 only goes to builds next week, hopefully, then it a fair estimate to expect the full release sometime by the end of October 2010, and not sooner.
In the meantime “we've re-opened the mozilla-central tree to unblock work on beta 8,” Mozilla stated.
Yes, there will be two more Beta development milestones of Firefox 4.0, with Beta 8 following the release which is targeted for the second half of this month.
And just to put things into perspective. Mozilla was initially planning to release Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 by the end of September 2010.
Beta 7 was also intended as the feature-freeze milestone, namely the stage in the development process in which Firefox 4.0 would be feature complete.
Mozilla was planning to already be hard at work on Firefox 4.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) in October 2010, and instead it is focusing on the eight Beta of the browser.
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.