Mozilla will delay the release of its forthcoming browser Firefox 4 beta 12 indicating several bugs still to be resolved.
As of 18 February 2011, five bugs remain on what Mozilla calls its ‘hard’ blocker list — those bugs that must be fixed before the company deems Beta 12 good to go.
One of the five bugs is rated "critical," while another is ranked "major" and three are labeled "normal."
Two of the remaining flaws are in Firefox’s hardware acceleration code, which shifts some of the browser page rendering and composition chores from the CPU to the graphics processor.
Originally scheduled to be released in November 2010, but open source software maker announced in October that development would be finalised only early in 2011.
But again in January this year, Mozilla said it expected to have resolved the 160 remaining bugs by the beginning of February and to release the final beta later in the month.
Christian Legnitto, who oversees Firefox releases, said that Beta 12 would probably not ship for several days.
"The bugs blocking beta 12 are expected to be fixed in the next day or so. At that point, we will freeze nightlies and then create the beta build when we are confident of quality," Legnitto said.
Mozilla faces pressure from other top browsers, with Google releasing the latest version of Chrome on 3 February and Microsoft expected to release Internet Explorer 9 in mid-March after shipping the IE9 release candidate in Mid February.
According to Web metrics company Net Applications, Firefox currently accounts for 22.8% of all browsers in use.
