Following a number of delays, the Mozilla Project has confirmed that it plans to ship the seventh beta for version 4 of its open source Firefox web browser on Wednesday, the 10th of November. According to Mozilla's Weekly Meeting Minutes, barring any last minute, major issues, a public beta will arrive tomorrow. However, the developers say that they are "investigating some possible issues that may cause a rebuild", noting that they don't yet have enough information to warrant a decision.

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. Other changes include a new 'tabs on top' layout, the integration of Firefox Sync, formerly known as Weave, and various new features aimed at web developers.

Originally scheduled to arrive in the second half of September, the Firefox 4 Beta 7 milestone will be "feature complete" and address a number of issues found in the previous beta. Based on the Platform Meeting Minutes from the 2nd of November, the seventh beta was being held by a single blocker bug, which now appears to be resolved.

The latest stable release of Firefox is version 3.6.12, a security update that addressed a critical vulnerability, while the latest development preview is Firefox 4 Beta 6 from the 14th of September. A final release date for Firefox 4, however, has yet to be announced.

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(crve)