14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla is firing on all cylinders trying to get Firefox 4.0 finished before its self-imposed deadline. While the plan was to release a sixth beta sometime later this month, Mozilla has announced that it will be issuing Firefox 4.0 Beta 6 later today to fix a few issues.
Note that this is not the Firefox 4.0 Beta 6 which has been talked about until now, and which has now been renamed Beta 7, but rather a bug-fixing update to Beta 5, a Firefox 4.0 Beta 5.1 if you will.
"We’ve decided to issue a small beta update in order to fix a stability issue on Windows and some rendering and keyboard/mouse focus issues on OSX related to plugins. This small update should be ready late tomorrow, and will be presented as 'Firefox 4 Beta 6'," Mozilla announced on its developers blog yesterday.
"This should have no effect on the schedule of the feature freeze milestone, other than to have its name change to 'Firefox 4 Beta 7'," Mozilla said.
"A bug to change all the blocking flags from 'blocking2.0:beta6+' to 'blocking2.0:beta7+' has been filed, and the release description pages on the wiki have been updated accordingly," the announcement added.
The update fixes a couple of issues for Windows and especially for Mac OS X users, but is otherwise indistinguishable from Firefox 4.0 Beta 5. Still, that doesn't mean that there's no reason not to update, just don't get your hopes up too much.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 7, which has been known as Beta 6 so far, is still tentatively scheduled for a "2nd half of September" release.
Mozilla wants to release a final build by the year's end and has already started to drop non-essential features to make the deadline.