Firefox 4 is nearly ready for release, a recent post on Mozilla's developer mailing list suggests.
"Team, we've worked tremendously hard on Firefox 4, and it's time to ship it," wrote Damon Sicore, Mozilla's senior director of platform engineering. "I'm seeing the same burst of excitement and activity that we've seen in the endgame of every release. We must press hard now."
Currently, about 160 "hard blockers" or significant bugs remain in the project, Sicore noted. Typically, it takes about six weeks to reach the release candidate (RC) stage once that number is down to about 100, he added.
'Firefox 4 is gonna kick ass'
In the coming weeks, then, the Firefox development team should aim to clear those hurdles by the beginning of February and ship a final version of the open source browser before the end of next month.
In the meantime, "bug counts demand another beta," Sicore asserted. "We'll drive the beta bugs to zero and ship another beta. If we can't get them to zero in reasonable time, we'll repeat, deliberately."
Testing will be a top priority during that process, he added.
"We need *everyone* to help in testing," Sicore wrote. "Specifically: Do not disable Flash, Silverlight, or other major plug-ins as we need as many people testing these as possible. Windows users: We need to know if you are affected by hardware acceleration causing crashes or other issues."
Once it's done, however, "Firefox 4 is gonna kick ass," Sicore reminded the project's "tired and stressed" developers. "You should be fiercely proud of it."
Bookmarks