14 DAY TRIAL // In the first half of September 2010 Mozilla will deliver a new Beta development milestone of Firefox 4.0 which will contain the same features as the final version of the next major iteration of the open source browser. However, this won’t be the upcoming Firefox 4.0 Beta 5 which is planned for delivery this week.
Fact is that Mozilla had considered to make the feature free milestone for Firefox 4.0 synonymous with Beta 5, but the browser vendor simply did not make it.
In this context, feature freeze was pushed back a few days, according to Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s Director of Firefox.
“At Tuesday's development meeting [1] we decided to shift feature freeze to September 10th, but still produce a fifth beta milestone based on a code freeze early Monday morning,” Beltzner stated.
“Developers should plan to have most of the blocking2.0:beta5+ bugs resolved by the end of [Saturday](midnight PT) and then use the weekend to stabilize and fix any regressions. The tree's been a little shaky this week, though, so I expect more landings over the weekend than usual.”
Essentially, Mozilla will prioritize some features and bug fixes for the upcoming testing releases of Firefox 4.0.
This will happen in two ways, by “retargeting features that are "almost there" to beta6+, and ensuring they are ready to land early next week, and cutting features which are unlikely to make any beta given the amount of work left,” Beltzner stated.
“This latter point will be painful, but is an important thing for us to do if we are to converge on our blocker list in time to ship.”
At the end of the past week I mentioned that some of the features initially planned for Firefox 4.0 were in danger of not being included in the successor of Firefox 3.6.
Of course, Mozilla insisted from the start of the development process for Firefox 4.0 that the feature set announced was by no means set in stone and that it could change. This of course includes some features being dropped altogether.
There’s no word from Mozilla as to what features will not make it into Firefox 4.0, but the browser vendor is focusing on releasing the browser by the end of 2010, and in this regard it seems prepared to sacrifice some aspects of the project.
Early adopters will get the chance to test drive Firefox 4.0 Beta 5 soon, with Beta 6 planned for release no more than a couple of weeks after.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 4 for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 4 for Mac OS X is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 4 for Linux is available for download here.