When is Mozilla going to release the next beta of Firefox? When the release candidate and final build of the web browser? News are scarce at this point in time and I will try my best to give you an overview of things to come. The latest public beta version of Firefox 4 is beta 11 which has been available for some time. We knew that the team planned to release at least one additional beta to fix blockers that prevented the release candidate and final release. What we did not know was if that would be the last beta, or if another beta release would follow suite.
Asa Dotzler confirmed yesterday that Firefox 4 Beta 12 “went to builds” on February 22. He furthermore mentioned that “this final (!!!) beta contains fixes to more than 200 hard and soft blockers”. The important word here is final which means that beta 12 will be the last beta before the release candidate.
He notes that there is still some patching to do for the release candidate build, with 26 remaining blockers of which half “have patches in some state of evaluation”. Mozilla has not yet revealed a release date for the final beta, release candidate and final version of Firefox 4. It is however likely that the beta will be available in the coming days, maybe even today.
I let you know once it becomes available so that you can update your beta versions of Firefox 4 to the latest as quickly as possible. Asa posted an interesting link in the newsletter pointing to Facebook’s updated HTML5 games benchmark which sees Firefox in the lead followed by Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 and Google Chrome. Opera and Safari follow with a big performance drop. The reason? Hardware acceleration. The three browsers that lead support hardware acceleration, while the other’s do not at this point in time. Opera however has already mentioned that they plan to integrate hardware acceleration in a future version, and that it will support at least the Windows XP browser as well.
Back to Firefox. If the developers stay on track it is likely that we will see a final release of Firefox 4 in the first half of March 2011.
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i think “Asa Dotzler” not “Aso Dotzler” :)
You are right, corrected and thanks for finding the typo.
I have been using the pre build since the 22nd and it is indeed much improved from the 11 betas thus far, the biggest is the memory consumption has been lowered significantly (from 1GB to 300-500K)
“Opera however has already mentioned that they plan to integrate hardware acceleration in a future version, and that it will support at least the Windows XP browser as well.”
This is a great bonus to those (like me) who are still using Windows XP and feeling left behind with new browsers implementing web acceleration with Vista and later.
Still looking forward to Firefox 4, and keeping a keen eye out on its memory consumption woes.
/m
Ummh not to ruin the party here but on Mozilla ftp there are pre-beta 13 available.
Anyway I have been using beta 12 for a while and it is fine so I can personally recommend to go ahead and update it.
Could be that they have not switched the terminology yet to RC. Why would Asa post that beta 12 is the latest if it is not true? Sure, could be a last minute blocker that forces them to build another beta. Lets wait and see.
Martin at this point anything could be but this would add even more confusion to an already pretty messed up story.
One thing I have always criticised Mozilla for is its communication: they should learn to shut up and make announcements when they have the “cat in the bag”.
How many times we have heard already “it’s the last beta” or “we ship on this date”?
I think too many.
They have confirmed that there is no beta 13: “I just wanted to send a quick note clarifying again that Firefox 4 beta 12 is the last planned beta.
It may be confusing that nightly builds after beta 12 identify themselves as version 2.0b13pre. The versioning is merely a product of automation. This DOES NOT mean we are having a beta 13.”
The 2.0b13pre is a typo, it should read 4.0b13pre
I don’t find much use in such articles. It would be better to please focus on features and not get caught up in blocker-spotting just because other blogs obsess over these things.