According to ZDNet, the Mozilla Project plans to ship a release candidate (RC) for version 4.0 of its open source Firefox web browser on or around 9 March. To date, there have been a total of twelve betas of Firefox 4, the first of which was released in July of last year, and the arrival of an RC will be a major milestone for the project following a number of delays that have plagued Firefox 4.0.

Once the developers have been able to fix any remaining hard blocker bugs, the Release Engineering team will start work on creating a release candidate build of Firefox 4. At the time of this posting, the CanWeShipYet.com site only lists a single hard blocker.

Firefox 4 is the non-profit organisation's next-generation web browser based on version 2.0 of the Gecko rendering platform (the Firefox 3.6 branch uses Gecko 1.9.2) and features a new Add-ons Manager and extension management API, as well as a new tabs-on-top layout. Early last month, the Mozilla Foundation confirmed that, following version 4, it plans to release Firefox 5, 6 and 7 this year.

Once the final version of Firefox 4 is released, Mike Beltzner, the organisation's Director of Firefox, has confirmed that he will be leaving Mozilla to join a company called DownUnder GeoSolutions, a small company that specialises in the field of 2D/3D seismic interpretation and other geological applications.

The latest stable release of Firefox is version 3.6.14, a security update that addressed several critical vulnerabilities, from the 1 March.

See also:

Mozilla releases Firefox 4 Beta 12 for testing, a report from The H.

(crve)