14 DAY TRIAL // The next development milestone of Firefox 4.0 will be shipped in early 2011, with Beta 8 currently available for testing. The fact that Mozilla will only be able to deliver Beta 9 no earlier than January 2011 is a true measure of the delays that hit the project.
Some users might remember that the initial plan was to have Firefox 4.0 wrapped up and ready to go by the end of November 2010.
But in November 2010, Mozilla still had three Beta Builds of Firefox 4.0 to deliver, and it only managed to offer Beta 8 to early adopters on December 11th.
And the final version of Firefox 4.0 is not really just around the corner. Not by any standards.
With Christmas and New Year’s Eve up next, it’s safe to assume that work on the next iteration of the open source browser will suffer, and that little progress stands to be made.
According to Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s Director of Firefox “the next product planning meeting will be on January 5th, 2011. We expect to be looking at a schedule for shipping Firefox 4 for Desktop Beta 9 at that time.”
In this regard, I think it’s rather safe to assume that testers will be lucky to get Firefox 4.0 Beta 9 by the end of January 2010, if no other delays hit the project.
Fact is that Firefox 4.0 has been pushed so far into 2011, that Microsoft might get to release Internet Explorer 9 ahead of Firefox 3.6’s successor.
Remember, Mozilla still has to deliver Firefox 4.0 Beta 9 and Beta 10 ahead of pushing onward with the first Release Candidate (RC) Build.
The latest blocker count for Firefox 4.0 Beta 9 reveals that there are some 49 major problems that need to be resolved, this not counting any regression issues.
In total, Mozilla estimates that there are still over 450 bugs that need to be resolved before Firefox 4.0 can be finalized and delivered to the public.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 8 for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 8 for Linux is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 8 for Mac is available for download here.