Mozilla has pushed back the planned Firefox 4 release to 2011, following difficulties releasing the first full-featured beta of the open-source browser.
Mozilla had hoped to release Firefox 4 in 2010, but a newly updated Firefox 4 schedule shows the first release candidate arriving in early 2011.
"Development on Firefox 4 has not slowed down, and strong progress is being made daily. However, 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," said Mike Beltzner, vice president of engineering for Firefox, in a mailing list message on Wednesday.
Six beta versions have arrived in recent weeks, but Firefox 4 beta 7 has not appeared, despite more than six weeks of frenzied development. One big issue holding up release has been the integration of Firefox's older Tracemonkey engine for running web-based JavaScript programs, as well as the incorporation of the new JaegerMonkey engine that draws on Google's V8 engine in Chrome.
For more on this ZDNet UK-selected story, see Firefox 4 release slips to 2011 on CNET News.
