Mozilla Firefox 4.0 Comes a Day Early

If you’re an avid Firefox user like myself, you’ve probably been growing impatient with the Mozilla team and the amount of Firefox 4.0 updates. Well, my fellow Firefox user, there is good news for us today. The final version of Firefox 4.0 has been “leaked” (or rather, simply just discovered on Mozilla’s FTP server) by eager users.

I can’t say I blame them for their impatience; Firefox 4.0 has been in beta since July of 2010. Some might argue that 9 months isn’t that long, but to them I say, “I don’t want to hear your rational argument! You could make a child in that amount of time!”. After all, Mozilla is officially releasing Firefox 4.0 tomorrow March 22… and if my calculations are right… that’s in 3 minutes (as of me writing this). Yes, we really are impatient.

I’m guessing the accused “leakers” found the final release by URL hacking (simply guessing the URL path to the file). After a day at work and seeing the news about Firefox 4 being found, I came home and tried guessing the URL myself just for kicks. Turns out it took me only a few seconds.

I headed over to the Firefox homepage and found the URL for the current version, Firefox 3.6 (http://www.mozilla.com/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.6.15&os=win&lang=en-US). From there it’s just a matter of changing the “3.6.15″ to “4.0″. I wasn’t kidding when I said it was simple. And that ends your mini-lesson on URL hacking.

Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s Director of Firefox, is urging people to be patient (or at least download it elsewhere) and wait until the official release:

C’mon Internet, we do this every time. We are seeding our FTP mirrors, but Firefox 4 isn’t ready until www.mozilla.com/firefox says so! #fx4less than a minute ago via webMike Beltzner
beltzner

It looks like no one listened to poor Mike as I was getting speeds of 15 KB/s from the Mozilla FTP servers. Mozilla hasn’t announced what time 4.0 will be released tomorrow, but until then hit the links below to get a sneak preview!

Download for Windows: Firefox 4.0 | mirror
Download for Mac OS X: Firefox 4.0 | mirror
Download for Linux: Firefox 4.0 | mirror

Patrick Bisch

Patrick is the founder and editor-in-chief of pinglio. He works as a system administrator and studied at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He currently lives in Chicago with his girlfriend and two dogs.

http://twitter.com/Chrome262 Chrome262

will try it tonight, see how it works on mac and pc side by side.
http://twitter.com/Chrome262 Chrome262

so far interesting, on a mac. the duplicate tab feature doesn’t seem to work though.
- http://twitter.com/Chrome262 Chrome262
  
  Ok, everything works really nicely and even looks better on the windows side (vista or windows 7). The duplicate tab feature does work on leopard and easily on windows. Just not on leopard, but when i did it on snow leopard it didn’t do it at first but then it gave it as an option, so maybe its will do it later. Like i said the windows versions have a nicer looking interface, especially in Aero, a lot better then chrome for sure.
  - http://twitter.com/Chrome262 Chrome262
    
    meant it works on snow leopard. But again been using it on vista a lot really looks nice, and you don’t have yo change the theme or anything. To bad they couldn’t do the same for the Mac side.