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In the gaming world it’s quite typical for a developer to tell the media they will ship “when it’s ready”, but another delay over at the Mozilla campus has pushed the Firefox 4 release out at least another month, and will likely pit the new browser up against some stiff competition from Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome 10 by the time it’s released. According to Christian Legnittom, Manager of Firefox releases, the final planned beta probably won’t ship for several more days while they try to iron out at least five major bugs on their “hard” blocker list.
All of the bugs in question seem to be related to the new hardware acceleration code which offloads rendering duties to the GPU where appropriate to save CPU cycles. One of the bugs is labeled as “critical”, one as “major”, and three additional that are “normal”. Assuming that Firefox Beta 12 ships sometime before the end of the month, this would put a release candidate out on the street by mid March, however, they did clarify that a beta 13 isn’t out of the question if new problems are discovered.
The Mozilla team at this point is no doubt acutely aware of the progress Chrome has made over the past 12 months, and they are trying to implement new strategies to keep their development times from turning into Internet Explorer years. Mike Beltzer, director of Firefox, has laid out a very aggressive schedule for Mozilla going into 2011 which would see us beta testing Firefox 5, 6, and 7 this year.
I’ll believe that when I see it!
Comments are closed on this article
GeneralEvilG
February 20, 2011 at 10:41pm
I solve this problem by having way too many browsers; I have IE9(Beta), FF3.6.13, FF4(Beta), Chrome (whatever it's up to now), Opera 11 and Rockmelt. I use them for different types of browsing, but I find myself using the FF4 beta a lot now. Posted on Rockmelt.
Eoraptor
February 20, 2011 at 11:57pm
Yeah, I'm in the same spot (save rockmelt, but I don't social network) I use ff4 for my day-to-day browsing, chrome runs my Google specific suite of Gmail, Reader, news, and occasionally docs, and Opera and ie 9 serve as backups.
schwit
February 20, 2011 at 10:32pm
adblock for Chrome was a start. Until it has Noscript it will continue to load a lot of crap that slows it down.
DogPatch1149
February 20, 2011 at 9:32pm
Unless Firefox 4 has some dramatic improvements in speed and stability, I'll be switching to Chrome and Opera - Chrome has more extensions (especially Adblock Plus), but Opera just kills it for speed on my systems and is starting to support extensions as well. I like 'em both.
Sorry, Mozilla, but the writing seems to be on the wall. You've served me well, but we'll be parting ways soon.
arosadler
February 20, 2011 at 6:25pm
Firefox 5, 6, and 7 in Beta this year? I don't think Firefox 4 will come out of Beta by the end of this year. I'm so tired of Firefox 3 that I'm starting to use Chrome on a regular basis. I don't know about anybody else, but I am about to make the switch. The add-ons have been the only thing holding me back, and that's really becoming a nonissue.
JE_Delta
February 20, 2011 at 6:59pm
Once Google Chrome got adblockplus, I swiched.
Firefox 3 is super slow and lags on my brand new PC
Eoraptor
February 20, 2011 at 6:16pm
while I dearly love Firefox, I think that, like its progenitor Netscape before it, the writing is on the wall. It's up against a juggernaught with a massive budget to throw at the same problem of "the better browser" and is already lagging behind on the development cycle working on the same sorts of problems. (graphic acceleration) Pretty much the only thing it's got going for it is that it's "not Google" which some people backlash against, and it has a more robust add-on jungle. But already a lot of Firefox add-on's are turning up in Chrome's store.
Come on guys
