Firefox 4 : gonna kick ass

Sicore called on all developers for their input. "If you disagree with a blocking call, say so loudly. Do not be timid. This is your product, we need you to own it," he wrote.

Developers should not disable Flash, Silverlight, or other major plug-ins because Mozilla needs as many people as possible testing on these programs, Sicore said. Windows users also need to report instances of hardware acceleration causing crashes or other issues. "Don't just assume that someone else has filed a bug already," he said.

"Firefox 4 is gonna kick ass, and you should be fiercely proud of it," Sicore concluded.

Mozilla released Beta 8 of Firefox 4 in late December. It sported a trimmed-down user interface (as has been the trend started with Google Chrome and followed by Opera and IE9 beta), and made some significant internal changes, with a new add-in system, a faster JavaScript engine, and lots more HTML5 compatibility.

Mozilla is almost ready to ship Firefox 4 and is working toward a late February release, Damon Sicore, Mozilla's senior director of platform engineering, said in a Tuesday note.

"We've worked tremendously hard on Firefox 4, and it's time to ship it," Sicore wrote to the developer mailing list. "We have to reach Release Candidate status as quickly as possible, ideally finishing the hard blockers by the beginning of February and shipping final before the end of February."

At this point, Mozilla has about 160 hard blockers - or bugs - to address. "Historically it has taken us six weeks to reach RC once we have 100 blockers left," Sicore wrote. "We must press hard now."

Those bug counts "demand another beta," he continued. "We'll drive the beta bugs to zero and ship another beta. If we can't get them to zero in reasonable time, we'll repeat, deliberately."

Addressing these bugs is priority number one, he said, "since it pushes the rest of our schedule." (story: PCMag)