14 DAY TRIAL // As I told you first at the end of the past week, Firefox 4.0 has been delayed, with Mozilla now confirming officially that users will not be able to download the final version of Firefox 3.6’s successor until the first half of 2011. The open source browser vendor did not provide any indication as to when it plans to actually ship Firefox 4.0 Final next year, but it is attempting to push it out the door as soon as possible, in early 2011.
With over a month passed since Firefox 4.0 Beta 6 was offered to early adopters, Beta 7 is till cooking, and baking time is not done, at least not for the time being.
Furthermore, Mozilla also increased the number of Beta development milestones that it is looking to deliver to early adopters ahead of the Release Candidate (RC) Build of Firefox 4.0.
Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s Director of Firefox, assured the public that despite the consistent delay it is all business as usual with Firefox 4.0.
“Development on Firefox 4 has not slowed down and strong progress is being made daily. However, based on the delays in completing the "feature complete" Beta 7 milestone against which our Add-on developers and third-party software developers can develop, as well as considering the amount of work remaining to prepare Firefox 4 for final release, we have revised our beta and release candidate schedule,” he explained.
While there have already been six Beta Builds of Firefox 4.0 served to testers, an additional four will be delivered ahead of 2011.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 8 is expected by mid-November, Firefox 4.0 Beta 9 by the end of the coming month, and Firefox 4.0 Beta 10 on December 10th.
In this context, the soonest that Mozilla will be able to wrap up and offer Firefox 4.0 RC is at the start of 2011.
“The frequent beta releases have been extremely helpful in identifying compatibility issues with existing web content, so we plan on continuing to release beta milestones through the end of December,” Beltzner added.
“Our estimate is now that release candidate builds will ship in early 2011, with a final release date close behind. Please note that, as always, this schedule is subject to change based on feedback from users and community members.”
Of course, as it is the case with any development process, Mozilla needs Firefox 4.0 to meet certain quality standards before it is released to end users.
Fact is that testers playing around with Firefox 4.0 Beta 6 as well as subsequent nightly Builds have been complaining about the overall quality of the browser.
And obviously, Mozilla still has quite a few more issues to iron out before it will be able to move ahead to Firefox 4.0 Beta 7, the next three Betas, the RC and then to finalize 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.