Mozilla Releases Firefox 4.0 Release Candidate - PCWorld

Image via CrunchBaseMozilla Releases Firefox 4.0 Release Candidate - PCWorld

The Mozilla Foundation has issued the first release candidate of Firefox version 4.0, finishing a grueling and ambitious beta development cycle for the browser.

This release candidate represents what the development team feels is a finished browser, said Johnathan Nightingale, director of Firefox development, in an interview.

The quality assurance team will still take feedback from users over the next few weeks, but if no major bugs are found, Mozilla expects to issue the full production release of the browser by the end of the month, he said.

If so, March will be a busy month for the ongoing browser wars. In addition to the pending final release of Firefox 4, Microsoft plans to launch version 9 of its Internet Explorer on March 14. And Google released version 10 of its Chrome browser on Monday.

Version 4 of Firefox is a major upgrade for the open-source browser, and includes a wealth of new features and enhancements.

The user interface has been completely revamped and streamlined, with the menu bar condensed under a single button. The JavaScript Engine has been overhauled for speedier performance. The Add-ons Manager has been upgraded to a full-page interface.

Tab management has also taken a great leap forward. Users can bundle sets of tabs into different groups, under a feature called Panorama. They can add small permanent tabs to the top of the browser, for those pages and applications they continually keep open.

For the first time, Firefox will allow users to synchronize their bookmarks across different computers and even with Android-based mobile phones. This is also the first version of the browser to include the Do Not Track feature, which can alert website owners if the user wishes to opt out of third-party Web tracking.

The release candidate is available for the Windows, Mac and Linux platforms, and supports more than 70 languages. Current users of the beta version will have their browsers automatically updated.

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Mozilla delivers latest Firefox 4 beta | Browsers & Add-Ons | Macworld

Mozilla delivers latest Firefox 4 beta | Browsers & Add-Ons | Macworld

Mozilla on Friday shipped Firefox 4 Beta 9, perhaps the last it will release before it pushes toward a final version now planned to ship by the end of February.

The newest beta includes fewer major changes than its Dec. 22 predecessor, with just a pair of performance improvements—one to the code that handles the browserʼs bookmarks and history list — called out by Mozilla.

According to Mozilla, Beta 9 sports 662 bug fixes or changes, less than half of the 1,400 it made in Beta 8, which launched a little over three weeks ago.

Although Mozilla picked up the pace between Beta 8 and 9—the interval between Beta 7 and 8 was six weeks—the company is pushing developers to get the code in shape for a “release candidate,” the last major milestone before the browser is deemed good enough to officially ship.

Earlier this week, Mozillaʼs head of platform engineering said there were still too many “hard blocker” bugs—flaws that would prevent Firefox 4 from final release—and urged “press hard” toward a February finish line. In a follow-up blog post Thursday, Johnathan Nightingale, the director of Firefox development,

called on all programmers to reevaluate their blocking bugs.

Saying that developers must take a “hard look at our blocker list,” Nightingale added that, “at this point, very few bugs are worth holding back that much awesome.”

Nightingale said that as of Thursday, 143 hard blocker bugs remained, and detailed which flaws fit into the category. “A hard blocker is a failure of a core part of our release criteria, e.g. a crash, a memory leak, a performance hit, a security issue, a [user interface] breakage that canʼt be recovered from, an incompatibility we canʼt stomach,” he said.

Itʼs unclear if Mozilla will do a 10th beta.

Although Firefox Beta 10 remains on a still-current schedule that shows on Mozillaʼs Web site, on Monday Damon Sicore, who leads the companyʼs engineering group, hinted that Beta 9 might be the last.

“If we canʼt get [bugs] to zero in reasonable time, weʼll repeat [a tenth beta],” he said on a Firefox developers mailing list .

By Mozillaʼs schedule, Beta 9 was nearly a month late.

After Firefox wraps up its beta cycle, Mozilla will issue at least one release candidate to shake out any final bugs. The schedule does not show a target ship date for the release candidate.

Nightingale said that he wanted to see a release candidate soon.

“Firefox 4 is good for the Web, good for our users, and puts the heat on other vendors to up their own game,” he said in his blog post yesterday. “We need to ship it ASAP—we want release candidates in weeks, not months.”

Mozillaʼs biggest rival is also nearing release candidate on its next browser. According to several online sources, Microsoft will deliver the release candidate of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) later this month, perhaps on Jan. 28.

Microsoft has said it will ship the final edition of IE9 before the end of March.

Firefox currently accounts for 22.8 percent of all browsers used worldwide, a drop of two percentage points since its peak in November 2009. Internet Explorerʼs 57.1 percent share during December 2010 was 5.6 percentage points lower than the same time the year before.

Related articles

• Mozilla Exec: Firefox 4 Will Arrive in February (pcworld.com)
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Firefox 4: Path to Shipping - mozilla.dev.planning | Google Groups

Image via WikipediaFirefox 4: Path to Shipping - mozilla.dev.planning | Google Groups

We've worked tremendously hard on Firefox 4, and it's time to ship it. I'm seeing the same burst of excitement and activity that we've seen in the endgame of every release. Over the past several days, component leads have again reduced their blockers by identifying hard blockers and those we can live without. We've around 160 hard blockers remaining, and historically it has taken us six weeks to reach RC once we have 100 blockers left. We must press hard now.

To Finish:

1) We have to reach Release Candidate status as quickly as possible, ideally finishing the hard blockers by the beginning of February and shipping final before the end of February. We'll need your help to balance these targets against the need to build a high quality product.

2) Bug counts demand another beta. 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. It depends on how quickly we can drive down the list of hard blockers that need beta feedback. This is our top development priority, since it pushes the rest of our schedule.

3) We need *everyone* to help in testing. Specifically: Do not disable Flash, Silverlight, or other major plugins 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. 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.

MOST IMPORTANT: We must ship the best possible product we can. If a blocker needs more time, tell release drivers and component leads immediately. If you disagree with a blocking call, say so loudly. Do not be timid. This is your product, we need you to own it.

I know you're all tired and stressed. You all do incredible work every day, and you've built an amazing product. Stay focused. Be nice to each other. Firefox 4 is gonna kick ass, and you should be fiercely proud of it.

All my best,

Damon

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Chrome finishes 2010 with 10 percent share | Deep Tech - CNET News

Image via WikipediaChrome finishes 2010 with 10 percent share | Deep Tech - CNET News

With the steady rise in Chrome, 1 out of every 10 people surfing the Web in December used Google's browser.

Chrome's gains have come largely at the expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, whose usage share has been dropping for years, but there's also a ray of hope for Redmond. IE9, which embodies Microsoft's ambition to build a cutting-edge browser once again, is showing signs of real adoption with usage that grew from 0.4 percent in November to 0.5 percent in December, according to new statistics from Net Applications.

Fractions of a percent may sound insignificant, but with hundreds of millions of people using the Web, they actually represent a large number of real users. And in the current competitive market, browser makers are attuned to where the growth is occurring.

For months now, Chrome has risen. Most recently, it rose from 9.3 percent in November statistics to 10 percent in December, according to Net Applications. That's helpful for Google's ambition to speed up the Web overall; Chrome is a vehicle by which the company can explore, develop, and promote new features, such as Native Client, SPDY, WebP, andFalse Start, that Google hopes will speed the Web and make it a more powerful foundation for applications.

Mozilla's Firefox, the second-place browser, stayed flat at about 22.8 percent, Apple's Safari rose from 5.6 percent to 5.9 percent, and Opera was flat at about 2.2 percent. Chrome and Safari grew at the expense of IE, which dropped from 58.4 percent to 57.1 percent.

Note that because browser usage overall is increasing, even percentages that remain flat from month to month still mean a growing user base.

Microsoft can take consolation that its share losses have come from older versions of its browser. IE6, an advanced browser when released nearly a decade ago but now despised among Web developers for retarding progress on the Web, dropped from 13.7 percent in November to 13.1 percent in December. IE7 dropped from 9.5 percent to 8.8 percent.

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