Mozilla To Release Firefox 4 Next Month

Neil writes "Damon Sicore, Senior Director of Platform Engineering at Mozilla, has announced that the company is almost ready to ship Firefox 4. On its mailing list, Mozilla has revealed it has around 160 hard blockers to fix, before proceeding to Release Candidate stage. Both the RC and the final version would arrive in February, according to Sicore. Mozilla was originally planning on having Firefox 4 out by the end of last year, but it had to delay the release till 2011. Last month, Firefox 4 Beta 8 was released for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux 32-bit/64-bit, with support for 57 languages. Mozilla's roadmap says it still wants to release a Beta 9, a Beta 10, and at least one Release Candidate build before the final version."

meh

[sortadan]

Been using the beta. No real complaints, seems a bit snappier, but on the whole no big whoop. If anyone knows how to get the status bar back that would be nice. And for some reason they always put find at the bottom of the page, which is totally not intuitive since users enter info at the top with the search and address bars...

This didn't release yet?

[Admodieus]

Wasn't this supposed to be the answer to Chrome - yet Chrome has shipped several iterations in the time it took them to get from 3 to 4? I think Firefox is on beta 10 or whatever. For a while, I maintained that I would switch back to Firefox once it matched the speed and minimalist interface that Chrome had, as I didn't like using a browser from Google. Now? Not so sure anymore - I'm so used to Chrome and it fits my workflow so well. It will take a lot to get me back.

Re:meh

[just_another_sean]

And for some reason they always put find at the bottom of the page ...

I always looked at that as a nod to vi. In addition to putting the "search this page" on the
bottom you can activate it by hitting the / key, just like doing a find in a vi buffer. As a
long time vi user I actually appreciate this and find myself missing it now that I use Chrome
more often.

For really hard core vi users their is also this for FireFox: Vimperator [vimperator.org].
For me it was a little too hard core and I never got used to it but never the less I
appreciate the effort put into it!

Re:This didn't release yet?

[Haedrian]

I don't think Firefox was ever meant to be 'minimalist'. I always saw Firefox as the add-on and feature platform.

Sure the line is getting blurry now... but I don't use FF because it opens 15 seconds faster. Just because it has features I find useful. Like the synch, and panorama and stuff...