Firefox 4 to See Official Release Next Month
Who’s ready for Firefox 4?
A recent post on Mozilla’s developers mailing list suggests that the Mozilla Foundation is nearly ready to ship Firefox 4.
"We've worked tremendously hard on Firefox 4, and it's time to ship it," wrote Damon Sicore, Mozilla’s senior director of engineering. "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," he told developers, adding, "We've around 160 hard blockers remaining, and historically it has taken us six weeks to reach RC once we have 100 blockers left. We must press hard now."
Sicore says the Mozilla team should aim to clear those by early February, with shipment of the final version of Mozilla Firefox 4 scheduled for the end of the month. The director of engineering told developers that they needed to reach RC status as quickly as possible and as such, it was important for everyone to be an active participant in testing. He specifically warned them not to disable Flash or Silverlight and asked that Windows users be especially vigilant about reporting issues such as crashes resulting from hardware acceleration. "Don't just assume that someone else has filed a bug already,” Damon said. “Make sure."
"I know you're all tired and stressed," he continued. "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."
Read his entire message here.
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Pushing forward because of IE?
Probably. IE9 looks like a real came-changer for MS, so Mozilla will want to get FF4 out the door before IE9.
Good news indeed. I've been using the beta for a while now, but one of my previously used addons isn't compatible, hopefully an official release will mean it'll catch up.
Plus it's good to see browsers moving forward since the bad old days of IE at 90% market share. Despite Chrome's speed I still like FF and am glad to see developments and competition.
IF FF4 is launched before IE9, Microsoft will launch a great browser, but will not be able to say it's faster, safer and more HTML5 Compilant than Firefox.
Well, Microsfot will say, but won't be true.
Good news indeed. I've been using the beta for a while now, but one of my previously used addons isn't compatible, hopefully an official release will mean it'll catch up.
I want my Greasemonkey back!
Probably. IE9 looks like a real came-changer for MS, so Mozilla will want to get FF4 out the door before IE9.
Which is a bad thing - FF 4.0 currently has over 300 known bugs. Mozilla has never managed to fix so many bugs in so short a period. And we all know what happens when an inherently excellent product is released with a large amount of bugs...