February Is Firefox's Month: Mozilla Firefox 4 to Be Released

Mozilla (News - Alert) has claimed that about six weeks is the needed time for bug cleanup in the launch of a new version. However, Mozilla leadership is looking for a finalized Firefox 4 as soon as possible, but it appears that Firefox 4 Beta 9 is currently frozen because until yesterday, Jan. 13, Mozilla was looking to post Beta 9 to its company’s FTP server. The final stages, nonetheless, are still in sight, with Mozilla Firefox 4 scheduled to be released in February.

Beta 9 will become available between Jan. 14 – 18, while Beta 10 will, hopefully, soon follow, displaying the final look and feature set of the browser. Mozilla’s Senior Director of Platform Engineering, Damon Sicore, is honest in admitting that there remains close to 160 bugs in the software, a.k.a. hard blockers, hence the reason for a scheduled Beta 10.

Firefox 4 is hoping to successfully release a crash protection feature, preventing a whole browser from crashing if a plug-in fails. Therefore, extensive testing with Flash, Silverlight and other major plug-ins has been done to ensure the browser will work properly on release.

The browser recreation has had its frequent hard blockers. Take for instance, TMC’s CTO, Tom Keating (News - Alert), who wrote in a recent blog, “I'm using Firefox 4 beta and one annoyance was that although I see the back and forward buttons, I don't see the little arrow that opens the drop-down menu allowing you to go back multiple pages in 1-click. Apparently, Firefox has gone with the minimalist approach and removed the drop-down arrow for viewing your back button ‘history’.” Keating had to find his own solution to the navigation issue.

However, Mozilla has come a long way, with the end in sight, from Firefox 4 Beta 1. It was reported mid-2010 that Beta 1 included dozens of major features and improvements. Perhaps the most noticeable new feature for users with a Windows PC will be the look of the browser. The tabs were moved to the top to make it easier to focus on the web content and easier to control the tools. For users with Windows 7 or Windows Vista, the menu bar was replaced with a single button so users can get to the most used options with a single click.