Mozilla Delays Firefox 4 Release Until 2011

Mozilla today announced that it will delay the release of Firefox 4 until 2011.

The decision comes after several weeks of stalled progress on Firefox 4 Beta 7, which was originally slated to ship in mid-September but slipped as Mozilla ran into several stubborn bugs.

Firefox 4 will now shift to release candidate status sometime in early 2011.

A GA, or general availability, edition will ship shortly after one or more RCs are built and distributed for final testing, a Mozilla spokeswoman added in an e-mail.

Firefox 4 Beta 7 is now set for release early next year, with two additional betas during November and another in December.

But that timeline could slip further. "We will not ship software before it is ready," Beltzner said.

He also said that the increased number of betas, another hallmark of Firefox 4's development cycle that Mozilla touted last summer, will continue. "The frequent beta releases have been extremely helpful in identifying compatibility issues with existing Web content, so we plan on continuing to release beta milestones through the end of December," he said.

Firefox has a history of slipping its schedule. The current version, Firefox 3.6, for example, shipped in January 2010, about two months later than first planned.

In the last month, Mozilla has dropped some features from Firefox 4 that it originally intended to include in the upgrade. It's unclear whether the company will rethink those moves now that it's pushed the release into 2011.

While Mozilla has delayed its next browser, rival Google has made good on promises to pick up the development pace of Chrome. Last July, Google said it would issue a new version of Chrome approximately every six weeks . Recently, Google shipped Chrome 7 seven weeks after Chrome 6's debut.