Mozilla senior director of platform engineering, Damon Sicore has announced that Firefox 4 is in the final stages of development. According to Sicore’s post on Mozilla’s developer mailing list, there remains around a 160 significant bugs left in the software, or what are referred to as “hard blockers”. A release candidate version will be made available once the bug count is down to around 100 known bugs. However, with the bug count still high, another beta release will be in the offing with the aim to drive the bug count down to zero through further testing.
One of the key features in Firefox 4, as has been the case in recent browser releases from competitors, is a crash protection feature that will prevent a whole browser from crashing if a plug-in fails. Sicore has asked people to test the browser with Flash, Silverlight and other major plug-ins suggesting that this is a feature that he wants to see working properly on release.
Other key features in the release include much faster speeds obtained by using the JägerMonkey JavaScript engine, the inclusion of ‘Do not track’ capabilities and improved ease of use.
Firefox currently holds the No. 2 position behind Internet Explorer. Chrome, Safari and Opera hold 3rd,4th and 5th places respectively
