Firefox 4 RC expected to ship roughly on March 9

There's light at the end of the tunnel.

Mozilla is planning to spin the first release candidate for Firefox 4 this Friday and the code is aimed to be released to beta testers as early as next Wednesday, March 9, developers said during a call today.

It's a major milestone. The first of 12 beta test versions of Firefox 4 was made available last June.

Of course, the RC could be available earlier if Quality Assurance signs off faster than expected. Beta 12, for instance, was made available last Friday, a few days before the expected date.

It is the first release candidate and a number of bugs have yet to be worked out but the team expects to ship the final Firefox 4 this month.

A number of printing issues were reported following the release of beta 12 late last week but those problems have been largely fixed, one developer said during a meeting today.