Firefox 4 release date revealed, coming March 22nd

Just a few short days after delivering the first Release Candidate build of Firefox 4, Mozilla's Senior Director of Engineering Damon Sicore has confirmed that the final build of the browser will be ready to launch before the month is out.

Firefox 4's public release has been pencilled in for a March 22nd launch.

Posting in a Mozilla Development discussion on Google Groups, Damon Sicore commented on the positive reception that met the first release candidatet, adding that now was the "time to make a decision to ship".

Sicore went on to add that both Mozilla's "IT and Marketing (departments) have indicated that March 22nd is an acceptable final launch date."

But the March 22nd date could well change if developers currently testing the release candidate come across any major issues or serious bugs, as detailed by Sicore: "If at any time we discover issues that would block final release, we would issue an RC2 as soon as possible, reset the ship date, and communicate to everyone."

Firefox 4 introduces several changes, including tabs now being placed above the address bar, mutli-touch support, a new add-ons managers, improved HTML 5 support and more. Unlike the recently released Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 4 will work on Windows XP.

You can give the release candidate of Firefox 4 a try here ahead of its final release later this month. Let us know your thoughts on Firefox 4 in the comments - what browser do you use?

[Via The Register]

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