14 DAY TRIAL // The first Release Candidate of Firefox 4.0 is quite close, although Internet Explorer 9 beat the next version of Mozilla’s open source browser to this milestone. According to Damon Sicore, Mozilla's senior director of platform engineering, Firefox 4.0 is expected to hit RC by the end of February 2011.
In fact, if all goes well, it sounds like there’s a chance for Firefox 4.0 RC to be made available for download as early as next week.
“Looking at the hardblocker bug list and not counting blocklist bugs, we have 22 bugs without patches (out of 51 open) that remain to be fixed to get to RC. This is it. It's time to do the final push to get Firefox 4 to release candidate,” Sicore stated in a message to those working on Firefox 4.0.
“I still see 91 non-blockers being fixed in the past seven days, and 84 actual blockers fixed. With 22 hardblockers remaining without patches, I believe it's time to do daily blocker driving on these few remaining items--triage the noms, review and push on each and every hard blocker, and give approvals the required attention to prevent regressions.
“We'll organize this today and announce in the engineering meeting. We can't afford to continue landing patches that risk significant regressions. It's churn we don't need.
“Time to show fortitude. We've done it before, and we'll do it again. Let's finish these last few bugs and aim to finish RC by Feb 25th,” Sicore concluded.
Firefox 4.0 has certainly suffered its fair share of delays, after all, the browser version should have been released sometime by the end of 2010 according to the initial plans.
However, it now appears that Firefox 4.0 is closer to finalization than ever.
Mozilla still has to offer Firefox 4.0 Beta 12, but it already confirmed that this will be the last Beta development milestone.
And if Mozilla manages to pull off providing Firefox 4.0 RC on February 25, chances are that users will get to play with the final version in March.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 11 for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 11 for Linux is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 11 for Mac is available for download here.