While Chrome continues to ship new versions for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, Firefox is slipping in its development schedule and will now release its fourth iteration not this year, but in early 2011.
According to an update on the Mozilla developer group, development time on Firefox 4 is taking “longer than initial estimates indicated.” This will push the 7th beta release to early November, with beta releases 8, 9, and 10 coming out through the end of the year.
That leaves the release candidate for Firefox 4 to be released in what seems likely to be the first quarter of the new year, assuming that the next four releases are on schedule. No breath shall be held among the TNW team for that coming true.
While the delays are frustrating, the development team is very upbeat about the larger product, saying:
“…great things are happening with Firefox 4. The user interface changes are converging, the graphics and layout features are wrapping up, and recently the JavaScript engine was dramatically improved. The result is a fast, capable Firefox that provides better speed and responsiveness for web applications and users.”
While that is certainly true, and while Firefox 4 is a large step forward for the browser, it seems hard to not to feel that the team is falling behind the Chrome community. What about you, do you still use Firefox?
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