"Team, we've worked tremendously hard on , and it's time to ship it," wrote Damon Sicore, Mozilla's senior director of platform engineering, on Tuesday. "I'm seeing the same burst of excitement and activity that we've seen in the endgame of every release. We must press hard now."

Currently, about 160 "hard blockers"--or significant bugs--remain in the project, Sicore noted. Typically, it takes about six weeks to reach the release candidate (RC) stage once that number is down o about 100, he added.

'Firefox 4 Is Gonna Kick Ass'

In the coming weeks, then, the Firefox development team should aim to clear those hurdles by the beginning of February and ship a final version of the open source browser before the end of next month.

In the meantime, "bug counts demand another beta," Sicore asserted. "We'll drive the beta and ship another beta. If we can't get them to zero in reasonable time, we'll repeat, deliberately."