This time, Mozilla may be serious about talking about a final beta for Firefox 4.
The company decided that one more beta, Beta 11, would benefit Firefox 4 before the release candidate can be sent out of the gate. You may argue about the reasons why, but, at this point, one more beta or less does not really matter. Most users do not care or have lost track of the betas anyway.
Mozilla built the first version of a Firefox 4 Beta 11 late last night and may be releasing the software to the public today or tomorrow. The browser is virtually finished and the core as well as GUI teams are currently picking up the scraps of bugs that are still considered as "hard blockers". At the time of this writing, Mozilla listed 6 bugs that remain on the fix list. It has been a long journey – Mozilla's bug list states that 3456 blocking bugs were fixed during the beta phase so far.
There is a growing excitement among the Mozilla guys that show the pride of what has been accomplished – even if we should note that Firefox 4 is way too late to the market and Mozilla may have been very lucky that it has not lost more market share than it did (thanks to a loyal user base.) That pride may be best shown by a post of Mozilla's Asa Dotzler, who recalled Mozilla's origins and the way it is competing with Microsoft:
"When Firefox 1 was released, Microsoft's annual revenue was about $36B and Mozilla was running on the fumes of its $2M over 2 years initial funding. There really haven't been many challenges so lopsided as this one that turned out as well for the underdog."