Mozilla developers have revealed that the final version of Firefox 4 will be released next week – provided no problems arise in the next few days.
The first release candidate of the next generation browser arrived last week after a whopping 12 betas; it was expected to arrive in November, and then pushed back to February.
After a developer meeting last night, Mozilla announced plans to ship the final version. “Today’s triage session concluded with all systems go for a Firefox 4 launch on 22 March,” said senior director of platform engineering Damon Sicore on the Mozilla message board.
However, he warned that the open-source browser would still be held back if any issues are uncovered before then. “As of now, there are no known issues that would stop us from shipping RC1 as final,” he said.
“If at any time we discover issues that would block final release, we would issue an RC2 as soon as possible, reset the ship date, and communicate to everyone,” he noted.
While Mozilla has had some criticism for taking too long to release the new browser, Firefox 4 arrives with perfect timing, as a Chrome 10 fault is taking out Flash, and the arrival of IE9 without support for Windows XP leaves some users looking for an alternative.
Firefox 5 is set to arrive in May, as Mozilla speeds up its release cycle to mimic Google’s Chrome updates.
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