First release candidate of Firefox 4 is ready

The Mozilla Foundation has announced the end of the beta development phase for Firefox 4 and the immediate availability of the first release candidate. This RC is feature complete, in over 70 languages, and the developers state that 70% of plug-ins are already compatible with Firefox 4.

The blog posting states that there are millions of users currently testing one of the beta versions of Firefox 4 and that their copies will now be automatically updated. The developers ask that users test this first release candidate and provide feedback on any problems they encounter. The release candidate is available for download with binaries for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

For more details on the changes in the browser, release notes and a fixed bug list are available. Users of the beta versions of Firefox 4 should be prompted to install the update but can accelerate the process by selecting the "About Firefox" menu item to force the download of the new release candidate.

Firefox 4 will be the last of the older style of development for the browser. Earlier this month, the Mozilla Foundation confirmed that, following version 4, it plans accelerate its schedules and release Firefox 5, 6 and 7 this year, detailing its plans in the Firefox Roadmap.

Firefox binaries are released under the Mozilla Firefox End-User Software License Agreement and the source code is released under disjunctive tri-licensing that includes the Mozilla Public Licence, GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1. The latest stable release is version 3.6.15, released on March 7th, which corrected a problem with Java applets in March 2nd's release of 3.6.14.

(ehe)