Mozilla confirms Firefox 4 beta 12 is FINAL test build

Mozilla release manager Christian Legnitto confirmed in the early hours of this morning that there will be just one more beta of Firefox 4 before the upcoming but oft-delayed browser hits Release Candidate status. "I just wanted to send a quick note clarifying again that Firefox 4 beta 12 is the last planned beta," he said. " …

[jaduncan]

How coincidental!

An MS service might be the only one on the internet to cause a large enough problem to delay a competior product? I for one am shocked.

[Rob Moir]

y'know

It's funny but that doesn't really sit well with alongside the claims that "no one uses Hotmail" does it?

[Keith T]

I think it is a lame excuse by Mozilla

I think it is a lame excuse by Mozilla.

I think if Hotmail was their only problem they'd have shipped.

[Anonymous Coward]

fuck it

that'll do...

[Ted Treen]

If...

If it stops just ONE person from falling into the clutches of Hotmail, then it's all been worth it.

If it makes others leave - then it's a triumph.

[Greg J Preece]

*Gasp* A Firefox article? I wonder what comes next?

Wait for it, wait for it...

[Fuzzysteve]

Use Opera!

It cures cancer!

Firefox smells!

umm... That about what you're expecting? ;)

[WonkoTheSane]

Enough Betas already!

Give Adblock a chance to catch up.

[Steven Knox]

No.

"...the team needs to rely on Redmond's help to fix the glitch. "

No they don't. If the Hotmail site is delivering standards-compliant HTML/CSS, then they need to fix FF to be standards-compliant. If it's not, then they need to LEAVE it looking crappy.

Just write to the standards and let the shit web developers look like shit.

[Greg J Preece]

Only problem is

The end user, being most probably ignorant of how a webpage works, will blame Firefox, because it works just fine in Exploder.

[Paul Shirley]

beta11 seems good

After the disaster area of beta9 I expected plenty more betas - but beta11 has surprised me. All the annoying broken UI elements seem fixed, seems at least as stable as FF3 (yeah, not saying much) and I can live with the RAM use. Looks good to go.

[Robert Carnegie]

But does it work with Excite Mail?

Why are you looking at me like that?

[fishman]

Updated old saying

Microsoft isn't done, until Firefox won't run.

[doperative]

UA spoofing helps

UA spoofing helps.

This problem fixed if I set general.useragent.override to "Mozilla/5.0

(Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.14 (KHTML, like Gecko)

Chrome/10.0.607.0 Safari/534.14".

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627729

--

The patch for bug 627729 is a Hotmail-specific code path that forces the use of

the old HTML parser for document.open() on Hotmail.

Remove that code path once Hotmail has deployed a fix for the problem at their

end.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=636692

[Steven Knox]

Good links

I would also include https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=636690

I'd recommend that all commenters be forced to read those threads before commenting on this article (I know it would have improved my comment) but I know how likely that is, so:

In summary:

MS Hotmail stopped working in FF4b. FF developers investigated and found that it was an issue with UA sniffing in Hotmail. They contacted MS developers, who confirmed the issue and have written a fix.

The Hotmail fix has been promised by the release of the FireFox release candidate. In the meantime, a workaround has been added to keep the (apparently many) FF beta users who also use Hotmail happy. That workaround will be removed once the Hotmail fix is released.

So nothing really left to see here. Move along.

[chrisjw37]

Hotmail - no problem, no-one in their right mind would use it anyhow!

Hotmail bug?

Pardon !?!?

Of course Firefox users are far to educated and refined to use such a CHAV tool as 'Hotmail'.

Problem solved.

QED

[Keith T]

Did you not read the article?

Nearly half their testers use Hotmail. One hotmail problem knocked out their whole ability to communicate with their testers.

[Luc Le Blanc]

MS delaying FF until after IE9 by tweaking Hotmail?

Smart.

[two00lbwaster]

FF + Hotmail user here

I use Hotmail via the Webmail notifier plugin, alongside a couple of yahoo accounts and a gmail account.

I get lots of newsletters sent to the hotmail account. I use a yahoo account for sites like this one.

[Keith T]

If Hotmail was the only problem, why didn't Mozilla put the OS X and Linux versions into production?

If Hotmail was the only problem, why didn't Mozilla put the OS X and Linux versions into production?

Surely there aren't many Mac fanboys or Linux types using Hotmail via the web interface.

I think the Hotmail thing was just an excuse.

[Keith T]

This reminds me of my days in first year university ...

This reminds me of my days in first year university, when it was always one more change and it will be working, one more test ... for hour after hour.

Maybe by mid-summer they'll have something to deploy in production, hopefully.

And now Mozilla has gone from one more change, one more test, to one more beta and one more month.

(And actually Hotmail is a pretty good service these days. The spam filter works really well. But Windows Live Mail, it is missing a lot of useful features. The way things are going, though I'm more likely to abandon Firefox than Hotmail.)