The original plan called for seven betas. Then it was extended to nine and we are currently close to Beta 12. It may not be the last beta. Mozilla, are we there yet?

Just when you think Mozilla is serious about releasing any more beta versions of its Firefox browser, you just know the developer will shake on more beta out of its sleeve. Given the bug count and the communication coming out of Mozilla, I was pretty sure not too long ago that Beta 11 would be the final beta before the release of Firefox 4 RC. Now we are seeing the first Beta 12 builds of Firefox 4 and the blocking bug count list was down to 0 at the time of this writing (even if Mozilla’s bug tracking site still lists 48 hard blockers and 86 beta-blocking bugs for the browser.)

Mozilla said that it is, given the small number of bugs in Beta 12, that tit “is plausible” that this will be the final beta for Firefox 4. But, Mozilla, doesn’t want to say for sure and wait for some plugin work to “crystallize”. At this point, it seems rather silly to argue about one or more beta and discuss “timing issues.” The browser is already more than three months late and even the most loyal users have started keeping track of the beta versions.

There seem to be good reasons why there will be a Beta 13 after all. The current Beta 12 (pre-) releases are not complete and miss, for example, the Panorama view button in the main menu. The crash rate of Firefox 4 Beta 10 is about 50% higher than the crash rate of Firefox 3.6.13 and Firefox 4 Beta 12-pre adds a few percent on top of that. Historically, the beta crash rate was much closer to the most recent stable version before the release candidate was published. There may be some extra work left to do.

Mozilla currently publishes lots of progress as far as bugfixes are concerned, but we have been listening to the same story over and over again for some time now. Mozilla, it is really time to get the RC out the door. Seriously.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.