Firefox Beta 4, 5, 6, 7 Coming, and All Betas Are Equal

Mozilla is currently gearing up to release the fourth Beta development milestone of Firefox 4.0, and the browser vendor has planned additional Beta releases.

In fact, as Mozilla’s Director of Firefox noted earlier this year, multiple Betas of Firefox 4.0 will be delivered, at a rate of once every couple of week or so.

According to Laura Mesa, Firefox Product Marketing Manager, Mozilla wants to change the way in which it is referring to upcoming Firefox 4.0 Beta Builds, in order to influence the public’s perception of the development process.

“Publicly, we think it’s best to start moving away from associating a number to a particular release. As of now, we have 7 scheduled Betas, and there is a possibility that we may need to have more,” Mesa noted.

“Potentially having to call out Firefox 4 Beta 9 in tweets, blogs, videos or social media could start to make it look like we've had an inefficient development cycle, and that--as well all know--couldn't be farther from the truth,” she added.

Essentially, the change would have Mozilla no longer keeping track of Firefox 4.0 Beta releases by associating a number with each Build.

This means, that at a level of public perception, there should be no difference between Firefox 4.0 Beta 4 and Firefox 4.0 Beta 7, as they would both be referred to as Beta.

“From now on, it would be great to refer to Firefox 4 Beta without the release number, referring instead to release as the "latest beta update" or the "newest beta release”,” Mesa said.

“Doing so would go a long way to make sure we prevent negative news stories about the length of the development cycle as we prepare for RCs and finally, GA.

“To be clear, we aren't going to be super strict on this or monitor how people are referring to the beta--far from it!

“We just wanted to send a general note out so that everyone is aware of what we're trying to do and why, hopefully ensuring that we have the most effective messaging in the market that we can,” she explained.

The Candidate Builds of Firefox 4.0 Beta 4 are currently available for download from Mozilla’s FTP servers.

If all goes according to plan early adopters will be able to download and start test driving the fully-fledged Firefox 4.0 Beta 4 come August 23rd, 2010.

Firefox 4.0 Beta 3 for Windows is available for download here.

Firefox 4.0 Beta 3 for Mac OS X is available for download here.