Mozilla has confirmed the release of the latest version of the Firefox browser for March 22.
The final release was set days after the Release Candidate build of the browser was released for public use on March 9.
Mozilla’s Senior Director of Engineering, Damon Sicore said that the public release of the full version of Firefox 4 has been set for March 22 but added that if issues arose with the final version it would be pulled back.
“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,” he said in a Mozilla development post on Google Groups.
Firefox version 4 was first released as a Beta version on July 6, 2010, with 11 more Beta versions following. Over 8,000 bugs were fixed since this first release.
The updated browser features core updates like graphics card hardware acceleration that allows graphically-taxing websites to boost performance as well as visual changes like sitting tabs above the address bar.
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9 earlier this week, meeting 2.3 million downloads in its first day. These figures were trumped by older release downloads by past Firefox versions like Firefox 3.
Other additions to the new browser include an Apps tab, enhanced tab grouping, enhanced JavaScript performance and greater support for the up-and-coming HTML5 format.
