Mozilla team member Damon has confirmed to developers that the launch date for Firefox 4 will be the end of February.
Damon writes 'Over the past several days, component leads have again reduced their blockers by identifying hard blockers and those we can live without. We've around 160 hard blockers remaining, and historically it has taken us six weeks to reach RC once we have 100 blockers left. We must press hard now.'
Some of the features expected to be included in Firefox 4 will be the new tab locations, which will give visual priority for more intuitive browsing as well as synchronised settings with multiple devices so you can take Firefox wherever you go and also being able to organise your tabs into manageable groups so that you can arrange in a fun and visual way. For more details on the features of Firefox 4 and to download the beta version please click here.
However as many ex-Firefox users have moved to faster browsers such as Chrome, do their new features have what it takes to fight off the stiff competition? What do you think? Would you choose Firefox 4 over Chrome or any other browser? Leave your comments below"¦
Via: Google Groups
14 thoughts on “Firefox 4 Release Date Expected for End of February”
I can’t wait! I’ve been looking forward to 4 for a long time. I can’t stand tabs below the address entry field. This has been my only barrier to loving FF for some time. When 4 is out, i will be defaulting all my computers to FF!
Firefox basically copied Chrome by placing the rectangular tabs up top! My heart will always stay with Chrome
I cannot wait, I had to move to Chrome for speed reasons but Chrome’s extensions are not allow to touch local data which means I’m quite restricted and have to still use FF for some dev and creative activities.
And my Nectar tool bar for shopping and certain security tools are not compatible with Chrome either.
I really want to go back to FF but have the same performance as Chrome!
@Kiran Sorry but Chrome really sucks. Probably one of the worst browsers now. Pages freezes randomly you have to refresh. It’s very sow to load a page. I just turned back to firefox which is way better imo. Many people have the same problem as me.
eh-em??! but have you downloaded the most recent stable version?? I have had almost NO freezes whatsoever since the 5th version and, if you look at the latest trends, Chrome is set to overtake Firefox and compete with Internet Explorer!
and by laptop is 5 years old – 1.5GHz and Chrome still runs smoothly!
I’ve used Firefox since well before they went 1.0 with it. Mozilla has a lot of history here, and Firefox has quite the ecosystem built up around it. While doubtless Google can get anything they want by simply throwing enough money and resources at it, I really doubt Chrome (at least in its desktop incarnation) is going to beat Firefox. And, with all due respect to those who use Chrome, Chrome’s most useful feature is that it exists at all. We need both competition in the browser space as well as enough browsers to define the practical tipping point for de-facto web standards, lest any one browser get greedy.
Firefox ftw as Chrome Ad block will have Google tell you to disable it on youtube to watch/waste hours of your life seeing the same 30 second commercials over and over. FF, you get to skip all of it. Thank you Firefox for cleaning up the web and keeping companies from forcing ads upon me. I probably have saved almost a days worth of my life using Adblock on youtube and not having to watch all those ads.
@Kiran You said: “[…] if you look at the latest trends, Chrome is set to overtake Firefox and compete with Internet Explorer!”.
Do you have any data whatsoever to support your claim?
What sort of time frame are you talking about? 5 years, 10 years?
Wikipedia has an overview of browser statistics from various sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
The latest build of Chromium pwns all.
@Dolly Well if this graph is right and is extrapolated then Chrome will overtake IE by the start of next year!
http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/05/internet-explorer-falls-below-50-percent-global-marketshare-chr/
I will stay with FireFox. I have tried Chrome and Opera but they do not have some important plugins that I frequently use in FireFox. Also, the ‘persona’ feature in FireFox is also pretty neat. I would have moved to Chrome or Opera if it wasn’t for the massive plugins database that FireFox has.
I started using Opera as my main browser for a few months now and unless Firefox gets really lean i doubt i would go back…opera does have compatibility issues now and then but for the most part i have been extremely pleased..lots of features and extremely fast. Tried chrome but the CPU usage was off the charts once i started opening many tabs.
In my experience Firefox is more stable than Chrome. Give Firefox the speed of Chrome and I’ll take Firefox every time. I’m running beta 12 now and it’s lightening fast :)
Promised as always… and never delivered on expected date. Fulano, March 3rd, 2011.