August 6th set as release deadline

Aug 3, 2010 15:12 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla is currently building the third beta development milestone for Firefox 4.0. An in fact, the browser vendor is extremely close to wrapping up the release, and offer it for early adopters to start test driving it. According to the progress made so far, it looks like Mozilla will be able to deliver on the promise of making available Firefox 4.0 Beta 3 for testing by the end of this week. Provided that all will go well, testers will be able to get their hands on the new Firefox 4.0 Beta on August 6th, 2010.

Of course, none of the release deadlines associated with the successor of Firefox 3.6 are set in stone at this point in time. And illustrative example of this was Firefox 4.0 Beta 2, whose release was postponed for a couple of days, and which was finally launched a week ago.

Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s Director of Firefox revealed at the start of this week that Firefox 4.0 Beta 3 was on the verge of code freeze. Beyond this milestone, Mozilla will start making available the first Candidate builds for Firefox 4.0 Beta 3. Testers will of course be able to grab the very early, nightly builds and test drive them, while the fully-fledged Firefox 4.0 Beta 3 will be wrapped up.

For the time being, the wiki page for Firefox 4.0 Beta 3 greets users with the following message: “We're glad you're interested in Firefox 4 Beta 3 - it's not quite ready yet. Our candidate builds are still going through quality assurance tests.”

Following the introduction of Firefox 4.0 Beta 1, Beltzner promised that early adopters will see a very accelerated release process for fresh development builds from Mozilla. Essentially, the browser vendor is looking to offer testers a new Beta milestone of Firefox 4.0 one every two weeks. Firefox 4.0 remains on track for general availability by the end of 2010.

Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 for Windows is available for download here.

Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 for Mac OS X is available for download
here.

Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 for Linux is available for download
here.

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