Firefox 4 beta 7 now due early November, RC1 in early '11

As many know by now, the release of Firefox 4 has been delayed until early 2011.

The Mozilla team has announced that the next beta, beta 7, is due in early November, beta 8 is aimed for Nov 12, beta 9 is slated for November 26, beta 10 is slated for December 10, the first release candidate in early 2011 and the final version will ship "close behind" that.

The delay, while relatively minor, appears to be causing angst to some add-on developers who complain that the soon-to-be-released beta 7 is still not feature complete and thus they cannot finish development and testing.

Beta 7 of Firefox 4 was expected in mid September and now is slated for early November.

In a mailing sent to followers and a separate schedule posted to its web site this week, the open source browser project announced that the Firefox 4 code freeze isn't expected until early November.

"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," project leader Mike Beltzner wrote.

The goal for beta 7 is to freeze all features, user interface changes and API code.

The delay is not considerable, yet the forthcoming releases of IE9 and Chrome  -- and especially the Chrome operating system with browser included -- is causing some concern for backers.

This would give Microsoft and Google an advantage over Firefox since their respective browsers will be integrated into their respective operating systems while Firefox would not, though it is bundled with most desktops.