Firefox 4 inches closer to release despite delays

The release candidate of Firefox 4 could be just days away despite widespread reports of delays, according to the community manager for Firefox.

The release — which had originally been scheduled for October last year but was subsequently delayed until February 2011 — could be just around the corner according to a post on Twitter from Asa Dotzler, head of community for Firefox marketing projects.

"From what I can tell, there are only seven unwritten patches standing between Firefox 4 and hundreds of millions of users," he wrote.

On Thursday, Christian Legnitto, the Firefox release manager at Mozilla, confirmed that the release schedule had slipped as beta 11 still had outstanding bugs. Developers have delayed building the twelfth beta until bugs that remained in the eleventh had been resolved.

"The bugs blocking beta 12 are expected to be fixed in the next day or so. At that point we will freeze [nightly releases] and then create the beta build when we are confident of quality," he wrote. Legnitto also confirmed that beta 12 will be the last before the final release, unless bugs found in the twelfth warrant another beta build.

Firefox 4 beta 7 — which was scheduled to arrive on 17 September and was originally intended to be the final beta build — arrived 54 days late in November. Each subsequent release — with the exception of beta 10 — has also been behind schedule.

As a result of development tweaks and delays caused by bugs, the Firefox 4 release schedule has slipped from its originally planned late-2010 spot but looks to be just around the corner, barring further bug discoveries.