14 DAY TRIAL // The wait for the next major version of Firefox just got a little longer. According to Mozilla, the upcoming Beta development milestone of Firefox won’t be available for download by the end of November 2010 as initially planned, but in December. The open source browser vendor attempted to wrap up Firefox 4.0 Beta 8 last week in order to make it with a release this week.
But don’t expect the eight Beta of Firefox 4.0 to drop anytime soon, because this is not the case.
Instead, early adopters will need to exercise their patience a tad longer. Since Firefox 4.0 wasn’t wrapped up the past week, the company has opted to have the release schedule match that of the next Beta of the mobile version of Firefox.
In addition, with Thanksgiving tomorrow, it’s hard to think that Mozilla will manage to get anything done this week.
The currently plan is to have Fennec Beta 3 offered to testers on December 7th, 2010. And in this regard, it’s highly likely that Firefox 4.0 Beta 8 will be released sometime in the first half of December as well.
After all, early adopters just received the bits for Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 just a few weeks ago.
In addition, Mozilla is currently focusing on softening all the rough edges of Firefox 4.0. there will be no new features added to the project, with the browser vendor focusing to resolve the bugs identified so far without introducing any regression issues.
As some users might know, there are still a few Firefox 4.0 Beta releases to be tested, as Beta 8 will be followed by Beta 9 and Beta 10.
It also appears that at least one, if not two of the Betas will slip into 2011, with the Release Candidate (RC) development milestone also planned for early next year.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 for Windows is available for download here. Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 for Linux is available for download here. Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 for Mac is available for download here.