Firefox 4.0 Final Launch on March 22

Mozilla is preparing to release the next major iteration of its open source browser, with the launch possibly happening in less than a week.

Nothing is set in stone at this point in time, but if everything goes well, Firefox 4.0 Final could be released to the public as soon as March 22nd, 2011.

Essentially, what Mozilla is trying to determine at this point in time is whether there will be a need to provide a second Release Candidate for Firefox 4.0.

Firefox 4.0 RC1 was offered to testers last week after no less than 12 Beta development milestone, and this could end up being the same Build as the Final release.

“Firefox 4 RC1 has received a very warm welcome; it's time to make a decision to ship. As of now, there are no known issues that would stop us from shipping RC1 as final. At the conclusion of our regular 11:30AM triage session on Wednesday, March 16th, release drivers will decide whether to ship RC1 as Firefox 4,” revealed Damon Sicore, Sr. Director of Platform Engineering at Mozilla.

“March 22nd is the day we would ship. Both IT and Marketing have indicated that March 22nd is an acceptable final launch date. If at any time we discover issues that would block final release, we would issue an RC2 as soon as possible, reset the ship date, and communicate to everyone.”

Firefox 3.6, Firefox 4.0’s predecessor, was launched in the second half of January 2010, which means that customers have had to wait over a year already.

Mozilla intends to ship major versions of Firefox at a much faster pace moving onward, with Firefox 5.0, 6.0 and 7.0 all planned for release by the end of 2011.

At the time of this article Mozilla hadn’t yet identified a need for RC2, which could mean that March 22 might very well end up as the release deadline for Firefox 4.0.

Firefox 4.0 Release Candidate (RC1) for Windows is available for download here.

Firefox 4.0 Release Candidate (RC1) for Linux is available for download here.

Firefox 4.0 Release Candidate (RC1) for Mac is available for download here.

Firefox 3.6.15 and Firefox 3.5.17 for Windows are available for download here.