Firefox 4 beta 10 this week, beta 11 next week
Mozilla is planning to release two more betas of Firefox 4, so says Firefox release manager Christian Legnitto.
- We’ll take the most recent green changeset from mozilla-central this Friday, 2011-01-21 at 2:00 pm PST and call that beta 10
- We will release beta 10 as soon as possible during the week of the 24th
- We’ll take the most recent green changeset from mozilla-cental on Friday, 2011-01-28 at 2:00 pm PST (or sooner if the remaining betaN hardblockers are finished) and call that beta 11
- We will release beta 11 as soon as possible during the week of the 31st
So what's holding up the release? Some 55 hardblocker bugs that need to be squashed before Firefox release, and an amazing 319 bugs that have been marked as fixed since beta 9 was launched need testing. Having two more betas mean that the newer fixes get more time in the hands of beta testers:
To control risk for the RC the plan is to do two betas (10 and 11) rather than hold beta 10 for all betaN hardblockers. This will give us a week of beta coverage for the 318 bug fixes while still allowing beta coverage for the remaining betaN hardblockers.
It also seems that Mozilla is pulling out all the stops to get Firefox 4 bug fixes into the hands of beta testers:
Code freeze for beta 10 and 11 will also be a bit different. Previous betas closed the tree to stabilize and reduce beta risk. At this point in development, every day counts–we cannot shut down mozilla-central over the weekend as we have done before. Instead we’ll freeze what’s in the tree and run with it, dealing with any beta issues on the relbranch. Instead of metering what goes in before a freeze we will be driving to get as many fixes as possible so they can get more beta coverage.
So beta testers, get ready for more beta testing!