Mozilla Firefox 4 Release Expected In February

Mozilla plans to release the final version of Firefox 4 next month, roughly three months after the original target date.

Damon Sicore, senior director of platform engineering for Mozilla, sent Tuesday an email to his development team on Google Groups, encouraging its members to sprint to the finish line.

"We've worked tremendously hard on Firefox 4, and it's time to ship it," Sicore says. "I'm seeing the same burst of excitement and activity that we've seen in the endgame of every release."

The team will have to work hard to meet the new release date. Sicore says there are 160 "hard blockers" remaining, and, historically, other finished versions of Firefox shipped six weeks after 100 blockers, which are basically bugs that need to be worked out. "We must press hard now," Sicore says.

The timetable has the team finishing all hard blockers by the beginning of February and shipping the final version of the browser before the end of the month. One more beta version is possible this month. Mozilla released the eighth beta of Firefox 4 in late December.

Mozilla engineers and contributors to the open source browser had shot for a November release, before delays in completing features made that impossible. The delay appears to have been a minor setback. Microsoft has released rival Internet Explorer 9 in beta. A firm release date for the final version has not been given.

Many reviewers see IE9 adding lots of needed improvements that bring the browser on par to Firefox 4. The latter loads Web sites much faster than Firefox 3.5 through better technology for running JavaScript and displaying graphics. The browser also introduces a tab organizer that lets the user set up separate groups of tabs and easily move from one group to another.

Firefox is the second most used browser on the Web, behind IE. At the end of December 2010, IE had a 57% share and Firefox nearly 23%, according to Net Applications.

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