Firefox 4 release date pushed to ‘early 2011′

By on Oct 29, 2010 at 6:05 AM
General October 29, 2010

If you’ve been awaiting the final, production, rubber-stamped version of Mozilla’s Firefox 4 web browser, you’re just going to have to keep on waiting. It looks like Mozilla and company have pushed the release date of their next generation browser to “early 2011.” Mike Beltnzer, Firefox’s VP of engineering, had this to say:

Development on Firefox 4 has not slowed down, and strong progress is being made daily. However, based on the delays in completing the “feature complete” Beta 7 milestone against which our add-on developers and third-party software developers can develop, as well as considering the amount of work remaining to prepare Firefox 4 for final release, we have revised our beta and release candidate schedule.

Of course you can still grab the FF4 beta from Mozilla — which is pretty stable — but we know some of you like the safety and security of an RTM browser. Anyone out there rocking Firefox Cuatro as their main browser?

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11 Comments

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  • Eric

    I’ve been using Firefox 4 Beta for a few months now, but I may regress back to 3 on hearing this. I love 4 but its still buggy and has deathly slow start times.

    • Robert

      My start times are instant – but that might be because there aren’t any compatible extensions yet…

  • ChocoBurrito

    Everyone is waiting for the white iPhone 4 that is coming out then.

  • http://c3dude.wordpress.com c3dude

    I use to be exclusivly a Firefox user. Then it started getting slower, and slower and bloat began to increase. Then Chrome came out and blew it away in terms of speed, use and features. Now, we’re at 4.0 and it’s slower than ever, still has no real improvement over 3, is buggy as hell and the number one feature they tout is ‘App Tabs’? Mozilla needs to get it together. Nobody wants you to support stupid features until you fix the browser itself and whatever the hell you did to gecko.

    • Brad

      I hear ya. I always swore I would not abandon Firefox for Chrome, given that Chrome, though fast, was devoid of most of the features I want or need. However, after running on every single beta of Firefox 4 up through beta 5 or 6, I watched as it just became slower and slower and slower. From what I could tell, the Adobe Flash plugin is actually the culprit, as it slows way down and starts acting goofy whenever I start getting lots of tabs open with Flash components in them. I’ve always had issues with Firefox 3.5 crashing when too many Youtube tabs are open, and while FF 4 doesn’t crash entirely, the Flash plugin will eventually die, and sometimes take the browser down with it. I know it’s beta, but it should be getting better the closer it gets to release. Instead, it was just getting worse. Oh, and did I mention that Chrome opens almost instantly, even when restoring numerous tabs?

      I kept reading about how Chrome usage was skyrocketing, so I decided to download it and try it one more time. I think this is the third or maybe fourth time, and the first one at version 6.0. Very soon after doing so, I made it my default browser on all my personal and work computers, and am using the syncing capabilities to sync bookmarks, themes, addons, etc. This thing now has every feature I need or want (including app tabs, which FF doesn’t even have in a non-beta release yet), is blazing fast, and handles numerous Adobe Flash pages easily without slowdown or crashing.

      Also, the ability to create application shortcuts for web pages is awesome. I created one for my Gmail account, and no longer bother with Windows Live Mail or Outlook or anything for using email locally. The web interface is just easier and quicker to use, and having it in a standalone browser window with unnecessary toolbars and everything stripped off of it makes for a nice, clean experience.

      To be fair, there are still some issues with it. I am running into sites that don’t render quite right far more often than I’d like to see, and I don’t think I can remember the last time I had a rendering issue with Firefox. The only time I had to switch to IE was to use a site that required an IE-only feature like ActiveX, but I’m having to switch a bit more often with Chrome now. Of course, I have an IE tab addon installed for that.

      Still, despite the issues, I am now a full Chrome convert, and am not looking back. The rendering will be improved as time goes on (and websites become more standards-compliant, hopefully). I remember when I switched to Firefox from Opera full-time when it went to 1.0, and many sites didn’t work properly. Once popularity improved, website designers started testing their sites in it, and fixing the issues. The same will happen for Chrome in time.

      • Brad2

        Wow I could have just as easily written this exact post myself. It is dead on. Plus my name is Brad too.

  • http://talkweb.eu Bogomil Shopov

    I am using Firefox 4b and I am more than happpy with it !

    //Bogo

  • Gaius

    Firefox 4 has been a train wreck so far and I don’t know about you guys, but I switched over to Chrome beta when Firefox 4 beta failed to impress me and now I use Chrome dev version as my main browser.

  • firefox rules

    I am so happy even in the beta it rocks it fast and i like the new ui. i been using FF since 2.0. it is the best.

  • FFGone

    I’ve been using FF for years now but this last update has broken the camels back. 3.6 is meant to be the stable version yet crashes constantly. Am downloading Chrome as I write..sigh..

  • Willycoady

    I have a TELUS HTC hero that everything including YouTube is being synchronized and cached. It’s incredibly slow. I phoned HTC mobile a 1 866 number and its actually worse. I feel my phone has been compromised and wish HTC would provide a new one. I received an apps download on the weekend, that worked at high speed for only 24 hours, HTC then told me to reset to factory settings. What a mess. Wilma Langdon.

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