In these 12 betas that have been released for Firefox 4, the Mozilla team has squashed more than 7,000 bugs.  I would say that is a pretty successful (but rather long) development cycle. Here is a little more about the process from the Mozilla Blog:

We are working closely with the community of add-on developers to ensure their Firefox Add-ons are ready to customize the features, look and functionality of Firefox 4 Beta. We couldn’t build Firefox 4 Beta without the help of our millions of beta testers and their feedback, which we welcome as we work to deliver an awesome experience to the more than 400 million Firefox users worldwide.

So, when will Firefox 4 finally be released? I’d say sometime in March is most likely.  To lean more about Firefox 4 – Beta 12, be sure to check out the release notes from Mozilla.com.

Firefox 3.7 will soon become Firefox 4.  Now to help make some sense of this, let me break it down.  Right now the latest version of Firefox is 3.6.2.  Once Firefox 3.6.4 has been released, then Mozilla’s main development will switch to Firefox 4.  Everything that has been Firefox 3.7 since then will now be re-numbered to Firefox 4.

So right now, other than a new interface – what does Firefox 4 bring to the table?

Overall, it looks like the goals of Firefox 4 will be:

• Fast: making Firefox super-duper fast
• Powerful: enabling new open, standard Web technologies (HTML5 and beyond!),
• Empowering: putting users in full control of their browser, data, and Web experience.

According to Mozilla themselves.  As you can see from the version number fuzzy math from earlier, nothing is set in stone just yet – but soon we should be getting a lot more news about this epic new version of the Firefox browser.

Are you excited yet, or is it still too early?

According to Mozilla Links, Firefox 3.1 will be getting the rumored update to tab switching that got a little buzz after Firefox 3 was launched. 

As said, there’s also a new behavior for Ctrl + Tab. Instead of just moving left to the next opened tab, now it switches between the current and the last viewed tab and I have to say I’m already loving it. I usually have to check several other pages while posting and to ease the tab switching I moved the reference tab next to the post edit tab to have it a couple of keystrokes away. There’s no need now: I just took the long way to the reference tab once and then it’s already at reach.

Want this feature now?  Check out the Ctrl-Tab add-on for Firefox.

So all is going fine here, and if your not seeing this post now, you should within a couple of days.  Then again, if you can’t see this post how would you know your missing it?  Quantum theory aside, expect the same ol’ Firefox goodness, just at a new home.

What can you do to help?  Get your friends, family and even that creepy Internet Explorer loving neighbor of yours to come visit and also pass them our RSS subscription link too.  Did I also mention you can get e-mail updates too?

The last of the Firefox 3 betas has hit the scene, and at this point it is hard to believe they are still finding things to improve on.  So where are the improvements from Beta 4 to Beta 5 of Firefox 3?  Well this is what Mozilla says:

Firefox 3 Beta 5 includes more than 750 changes from the previous beta, improving stability and web compatibility, providing platform and user interface enhancements, and resulting in the fastest Firefox ever. Many of these improvements were based on community feedback from the previous beta.

Be sure to check out all of the release notes, and to take a full tour – Mozilla Links has you covered yet again.  So if this is the latest of the betas, what does come next?  The next release should be a release candidate version which will be what we can expect to see in the final process.  With the release candidates they will be having more people test things out and kind of polishing little things here and there. 

[Learn More About Check4Change!]