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back to article Mozilla delays Firefox 4 until 'early 2011'

Mozilla has pushed back the planned release of Firefox to sometime in "early 2011." Previously, the open source outfit had said its latest desktop browser would be officially released next month. "As discussed in today’s Firefox delivery meeting, release candidate builds are now scheduled to ship in early 2011, with the final …

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  1. Mark C Casey

    Gotta say..

    Firefox 4 is so far pretty outstanding, I usually make the switch from current to the next version when it hits the RC stage. (to use as my main browser)

    There are still little niggles, like a webpage which hits the cpu hard with some bad js slows/freezes up the UI so closing the tab is a pain (a problem Chrome does not suffer from).

    Hopefully when they finally get Electrolysis up and running everything will be hunky dory in that regard.

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  2. mittfh

    The wonders of open source...

    They'll release FF 4 when the product is ready for release.

    Compare and contrast to a certain proprietary software company, which releases products when the marketing department is ready, regardless of how finished the product is...

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  3. SilverWave
    Linux

    Yeah it will be ready when its ready.

    And as I use ff 64bit on Linux...

    It may be a little longer.

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  4. Cucumber C Face
    Paris Hilton

    Upgrade apathy

    Am I the only one that greets browser upgrades with as much enthusiasm as most receive a new Windows OS?

    I am plainly unique in not needing animated fairies gambolling in high-res along my themed toolbars. Neither do I run weather prediction models coded in JavaScript.

    I stick with Firefox for the plugins. It's done pretty much everything I want fine since early 2.n

    Paris - because she upgrades boyfriends at roughly the same frequency. Each time they're always bigger and sometimes dumber. Otherwise you can't tell the bloody difference.

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    1. Keith T
      Reply Icon

      Partly it is internal optimizations

      Largely it is internal optimizations and ability to handle new HTML and other standards, stuff consumers browsing never notice (other than, "gee its slow"), but that is important for web developers.

      I agree the fancy themes were a bit of wasted effort or most users. Needless code that they now need to maintain.

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  5. Andrew Norton

    Not worth waiting for

    I've been using Fx 4b6 for a month and a bit now. I'm not impressed. At the same time I installed it, I also installed Opera 10.70 beta, IE9 beta, and the then beta chrome7.

    IE9 works great, much better than Fx4. Opera and chrome are just small improvements of what already exists. Firefox is being left behind, badly.

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    1. Peter Hewitt
      Reply Icon
      Paris Hilton

      Newer builds than beta 6

      Beta 6 is rather "meh" however out of curiosity I've been using the nightlies and just a week after that beta there was a significant improvement in speed and the interface looks MUCH better and works in a much slicker manner.

      It doesn't have the same incredible speed as IE9 yet however its far faster than B6.

      Hopefully these next few months will be spent on performance issues as that seems the most major issue on the nightlies.

      Paris, because performance is key to her success too.

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    2. Randall Shimizu
      Reply Icon

      I prefer Firefox

      I am quite satisfied with the current version of FF. I have always like Firefox for the flexibility and control it gives me. I have always disliked IE it's still a clunky browser after all these years. Occasionally I will use Chrome. But recently I discovered that Chrome will not allow you make the browser show the fonts that you choose.

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  6. yeehaw....
    Unhappy

    ribbon loading instead of whirling infinity thing...

    I liked that little detail - kept crashing and brought me back to FF 3.6 (major cluster on the 0day).

    Tried the latest x64 Minefield and it seems stable atm - ribbon history though.. sigh.

    Odd to see anybody say anything good about IE....

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      it does seem strange to see a Microsoft compliment

      IE may be great and Windows 7 might be really good too. I don't know nor do I care. Microsoft has been paid handsomely for IE and Windows and have for years provided products that were barely functional and insecure. Others, many others, have done better for little or no pay but the big money has always been able suppress the competition. Oh, the times they are a changin'.

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  7. Keith T
    Pint

    Better a little late than horribly buggy

    Better a little late than horribly buggy. After a year, people will forget your release was a few months late. They never forget if it was a disaster.

    Of course the best strategy is to tell the outside world about a 12 month project is to tell the world it is a 14 month project, so you can slip 2 months with nobody knowing. And if you're on time by the real schedule, people are pleasantly surprised.

    But that sort of expectations management can't be done with open source, since the outside world knows what the inside world knows.

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  8. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    Firefox update helped my battery life a lot

    @Cucumber C Face -- no I don't get too excited over browser updates either. However, although I don't run huge javascript stuff, I do appreciate the speedups. My Mini 10, Updating from Firefox 3.0 to 3.6 has increased my battery life by something like 30 minutes. I have not had any performance problems with my Mini* , but the Javascript speedups mean the CPU now almost always stays clocked down to 800mhz, whereas with 3.0 it'd frequently jump to 1.33ghz.

    *Those claming the Atom CPU is not fast enough made the mistake of ordering the Mini with Windows. The Atom CPU does not have instruction reordering, so it runs code very poorly that is not built for the Atom... Ubuntu netbook remix is specifically built for the Atom CPU so it's quite fast on it. Although I did almost immediately turn off the special interface in favor of plain ol' gnome.

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  9. Winkypop Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    A (not so) quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

    I'm happy to wait for a more solid product.

    2 1
  10. Patrick O'Reilly

    UI Parity

    having a consistent UI across platforms would be great. actually maybe not, its just a poor imitation of the Bjork Web Browser

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  11. Sentient

    Webgl

    is really nice.

    Not that I plan on playing games in the browser it's nice tech anyway. And someone more creative than me will be able to do nice things with it.

    http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?page_id=1217

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