14 DAY TRIAL // With less than a month to go until the next major iteration of Mozilla’s open source browser, a new Firefox 7 Beta release is now available for download to early adopters. While the official ‘Welcome to the Firefox Future’ page is still offering Firefox 7.0b2 to testers, Mozilla has already launched Firefox 7.0b3 and now Firefox 7.0b4.
Instead of thinking of the latest Build as Firefox 7 Beta 4, which it really isn’t, users need to take the release as a new refresh to the original Beta.
Since Firefox 7 graduated from Aurora, Mozilla provided no less than four Beta refreshes, with the most recent Beta Build live on the company’s FTP servers where it’s up for grabs to early adopters.
Of course, per the overhauled development process, the open source browser vendor is currently focusing on preparing Firefox 7 for release.
This means that testers will not see any major changes between Firefox 7 Beta Refresh 3 and Beta Refresh 4, especially since the work is mainly geared towards dealing with all issues that could impact release.
Provided that everything goes well, Firefox 7 Final should be offered to users in just three weeks. So far Mozilla has been on track with all new releases, such as Firefox 5 and Firefox 6, launched six weeks apart, so it’s highly likely that customers will be running Firefox 7 by the end of September 2011.
The last week of this month will bring with it not just Firefox 7 Final, but also Firefox 8 Beta and Firefox 9 Aurora. The plan is to finalize the development process for both Firefox 8 and Firefox 9 by the end of 2011.
Later this month, Mozilla will also start work on Firefox 10, the first Firefox version to release in 2012, most likely by the end of January.
Firefox 7 Beta Refresh 4 and Firefox 6.0.1 for Windows are available for download here.
Firefox 7 Beta Refresh 4 and Firefox 6.0.1 for Linux are available for download here.
Firefox 7 Beta Refresh 4 and Firefox 6.0.1 for Mac are available for download here.