Looks like Firefox 3 beta 4 will be released soon since as of this morning, the update to the nightly builds (trunk) has now gone to "Minefield/3.0b5pre". A fifth beta has become necessary due to an outstanding 200 bugs that still need to be fixed. This is not nearly as bad as it might sound considering the thousands of bugs that have already been fixed never mind the huge number of enhancements that has gone into this new version and believe me, all that hard work shows.

The beta 4 code freeze was supposed to have taken place back on February 26th and for all intensive purposes it’s true. The slightly longer than normal delay in getting Firefox 3 Beta 4 out to the public is simply because of the amount of patches and fixes that have "Beta 4" labels stuck on them that need to be incorporated in the new Beta 4 build before release.

Anybody that has attempted to improve on anything from software to business models to remodeling a kitchen and everything in between has found out for every single item you fix 3 new problems crop up so I had to chuckle at this head slapping remark of an obviously frustrated, self criticizing developer on the need for a fifth beta due to the new bugs cropping up:

“We’re not breaking them because we’re jerks but because we’re stupid,” quipped one of the developers. “No one is really happy about this. Obviously, .. the goal of beta 4 was [to be]the last beta but it’s not.”

Firefox 3 beta 4 code freeze tonight, beta 5 release looks likely | Open Source | ZDNet.com

And I remember that feeling well enough during my years doing R & D. For those of you having a twisted technical frame of mind like myself you might want to take a look at the results of a set of tests that were run on Firefox 3 Beta 3 in this article by Percy Cabello at Mozilla Links. From the looks of those tests and from running a few of those tests myself, receiving close to the same results, shows that not only has there been large inroads made on significantly improving the performance of scripting and memory recovery (for example) in Firefox 3 but consistency between users as well which is equally important.

For the rest of us there’s been some polishing done on the icon sets, most obvious of which is looks of the keyhole style back and forward buttons of the standard navigation tool bar as seen in this example from my XP powered PC (sorry, I’ll do Vista when I can afford to buy a brand new PC and/or when the majority of Vista users stop complaining about it).

Also the Add-ons Manager recieved a new icon for the Plugins. I’m not too sure if I’m hip with the new purple color but the color and shape of a singular icon IMHO is hardly worth griping about.

And finally a bit of "buffing out" to the Options dialog to finish it off. To be honest about it I know that some (very) minor changes have been made within the last few builds but for the life of me I can’t remember the looks of every single nightly build I’ve downloaded. Maybe one of you can see what it might be. Either way, I like the latest "polish".

If you’re a Firefox user you certainly can’t say that the beginning of 2008 has been boring at all. The developers at Mozilla seem to be absolutely obsessed with stomping all of the bugs flat this time. As an old(er) beta tester I can attest here and now that it’s simply not possible to  get all of them, it’s just the nature of the beast, but I can honestly say that I haven’t seen such a concentrated effort on the part of a development team as displayed in the past several weeks by the Firefox team. Hope they meet with success otherwise I fear for their mental well being.