Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Beta 9 of Mozilla Firefox 4 arrives, final version in Feb?

The ninth and possibly the last Beta version of Mozilla's Firefox 4 browser has been released and can be downloaded from Mozilla site for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It is anticipated that the final stable version would launch by February end.

The changes in this Beta include two performance improvements relating to the bookmarks and history list। Mozilla relates that a total of 662 bugs have been fixed in the Beta 9, which is not even half of the bugs fixed in the previous Beta 8 launched in December 22. The Beta 8 saw about 1,400 bugs getting fixed.

Mozilla is pressing developers hard for a February release but still many "hard blocker" bugs need to be fixed for the final release to be in time. Although a Beta 10 for Firefox 4 is still on the schedule, the Beta 9 could well be the last.

Mozilla's competitor Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 is scheduled to launch a release candidate this month followed by the final edition before March end. This would surely pump Mozilla to deliver at least the release candidate in February followed by the final product as soon as they can.