Mozilla Urges Devs to Finish Firefox 4 In Time for a February Release

Posted 01/14/2011 at 8:57am | by Paul Lilly

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With Chrome quickly adding browser market share and Internet Explorer still way out in front, Mozilla is eager to get Firefox 4 in the hands of its users sooner than later. It's Mozilla's hope that Firefox 4 will be ready for prime time by the end of February, the browser maker revealed in an email to its developers.

"We've worked tremendously hard on Firefox 4, and it's time to ship it," Mozilla's Damon Sicore wrote in an email. "I'm seeing the same burst of excitement and activity that we've seen in the endgame of every release... To finish, we have to reach Release Candidate status as quickly as possible, ideally finish the hard blockers by the beginning of February and shipping final before the end of February."

Hard blockers are bugs that would prevent a final release, and right now there are about 160 of them, Sicore said. He added that it's historically taken six weeks to reach a Release Candidate once there are 100 hard blockers left.

To help move things along, Mozilla is urging developers and testers not to disable Flash, Silverlight, or other major plugins.

"Windows users: We need to know if you are affected by hardware acceleration causing crashes or other issues," Sicore said. "Don't just assume that someone else has filed a bug already. Make sure. Ask someone if you don't know how. This is very important."