Ben Goodger has released details of Mozilla Firefox not a beta release prior to 1.0. Firefox 0.10 should be out mid-August and see the bug list shrinking dramatically. It’s promising news, having personally been a keen follower of the project for probably going a year now (and longer, if you include Mozilla’s Suite product as well).

It’ll be especially nice, hopefully, to see some polish coming into the product. While overall Firefox is an excellent, nay wonderful piece of software, it still has many rough edges. The theme still needs finishing, naturally but there’re still some things that don’t behave quite the way they should. The sound effect that accompanies Find-As-You-Type, for instance. Completely random and ignorant of whether you’ve chosen the “No Sounds” option in Windows itself.
I’m also of the view that some of the default options need tweaking, and maybe some “first time” dialogs adding (a choice over the default Download destination, for example).

I’ve learned to have a lot of faith in the Firefox development team though, and long ago accepted that there would be decisions that wouldn’t go the way of the sometimes rather self-important “community”. It’s sad to see so many threads on Mozillazine constantly “demanding” that Ben Goodger introduce or change some particular feature.

I’m waiting in anticipation for 1.0 and rather looking forward to hearing what feature improvements Mozilla.org have planned post-1.0. That could see a real acceleration in new features which has naturally slowed in recent months as development focuses on stability.