Mozilla has pushed back the planned release of Firefox to sometime in "early 2011." Previously, the open source outfit had said its latest desktop browser would be officially released next month.

"As discussed in today’s Firefox delivery meeting, release candidate builds are now scheduled to ship in early 2011, with the final GA release shortly after," a Mozilla representative tells The Register. The new Firefox 4 release schedule can be found here.

Firefox 4 is now in its sixth beta release. Beta 7 — the "feature complete" beta — was due on September 17, but according to Mozilla's schedule, it will not arrive until November.

Mozilla's Firefox headman Mike Beltzner also discussed the change on the Mozilla development mailing list. "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," he said.

"Please note that, as always, this schedule is subject to change based on feedback from users and community members."

Asked to provide additional comment, the organization pointed us back to Beltzner's email.

The previous version of the open source browser, Firefox 3.6, encountered a similar delay on the road to its official release. Mozilla had planned to release the browser before the end of 2008, but stable code didn't arrived until after the New Year. The outfit also delayed the release of Firefox 3.5 several times, and this sparked a name change for the browser. It was originally known as Firefox 3.1. ®