Mozilla Planning To Ship Final Firefox 4.0 By February End!

An article by Vinay Gowda    8 Comments

Mozilla has been working very hardly towards its next big release Firefox 4.0. As you all know Firefox 4.0 release was planned to go live on mid of October, 2010 and it has been delayed for nearly 3months now! And still they are not done yet!

Mozilla has scheduled to release Firefox 4 Beta 9 for today and they have updated their branch to Beta 10 which is available under Minefield version of Firefox 4.

Tech Link: Download Firefox 4.0 Beta 10 pre-release.

In yesterday’s discussion, Damon Sicore, senior director of engineering at Mozilla stressed Firefox developers to press hard now and said,

We’ve worked tremendously hard on Firefox 4, and it’s time to ship it.  I’m seeing the same burst of excitement and activity that we’ve seen in the endgame of every release.  Over the past several days, component leads have again reduced their blockers by identifying hard blockers and those we can live without.

We’ve around 160 hard blockers remaining, and historically it has taken us six weeks to reach RC once we have 100 blockers left.

Well to reach this target Damon noted 3 points to achieve it,

1. We have to reach Release Candidate status as quickly as possible, ideally finishing the hard blockers by the beginning of February and shipping final before the end of February.
2. Bug counts demand another beta. We’ll drive the beta bugs to zero and ship another beta. If we can’t get them to zero in reasonable time, we’ll repeat, deliberately.  It depends on how quickly we can drive down the list of hard blockers that need beta feedback.
3. We need *everyone* to help in testing.

Well these are the three important points he put in front of all developers to look out for. As said above, it is confirmed that Firefox is left with one more beta i.e. Beta 10 before Release Candidate and final Firefox 4.0.

Mozilla is working hard to handle Flash, Silverlight, or other major plugins and they are not ready to disable any of them. And to provide crashes free Firefox 4.0 for Windows user by having properly hardware accelerated.

In the end, Damon had to boost enthusiasm of tired developers and said,

I know you’re all tired and stressed. You all do incredible work every day, and you’ve built an amazing product. Stay focused. Be nice to each other. Firefox 4 is gonna kick ass, and you should be fiercely proud of it.

This is your product, we need you to own it.

That was very kind words by Damon to hard worked Firefox 4.0 developers.

We can expect full fledged version of Firefox 4.0 by end of this February. And about our browser war, it’s going to great when Firefox 4.0 meets Google Chrome 10 and IE9 RC.